U.S National Guard’s airport upgrade

In Kansas, specialist contractor Pavers has carried out important work for the National Guard. The aim of the work was to rehabilitate a WWII era hangar apron for the Kansas National Guard. The project required extensive repair work, including pavement patching, dowel bar retrofitting, partial depth patching and joint sealing. Pavers had to overhaul a 305m x 91.5m apron at Army Aviation Support Facility No 2 that suffered from poor drainage. The project included milling 152mm of old asphalt and concrete and replace it with a fresh concrete overlay.

The company has plenty of experience in airport paving and repair work in Kansas and the Salina airport project for the National Guard had the company facing 610mm of concrete and asphalt. The scope of the project meant sharing responsibilities with other contractors. One contractor did the milling for the top 152mm of old concrete and asphalt that needed to come out, while another company was needed to install a 25.4mm thick asphalt bond separation layer. A third major subcontractor provided traffic control, installing barriers around the work area, and doing striping. Pavers focused on the drilling, doweling and concrete overlay work.

For the dowel drilling work Pavers used pneumatic equipment from Oklahoma-based 2976 E-Z Drill. Two slab rider drills helped speed along the Kansas National Guard project. When Pavers set to work with a crew of about 15-18 employees to reconstruct the apron for the Guard, it divided the 27,870m2 tarmac area near the hangar into 18, 4.88m-wide lanes, along with a few smaller areas. The company drilled more than 32,000 holes to complete the work, with about 875 holes for each lane edge. In just a day and a half, Pavers was able to finish four 305m -long edges, a very high productivity rate. The process consisted of the crew pouring two lanes at a time, then coming back to drill the edges on both before moving to the next lanes.

Pavers employed the E-Z Drill Model 210B-2 SRA, a two-gang slab rider drill, and the Model 210B-3 SRA, a three-gang version, to drill the thousands of 2.22mm diameter, 457mm deep holes needed for the project. Once Pavers had each lane’s holes drilled, it epoxied the dowels into place and finished off the lane with fresh concrete.

Having the right equipment and experience had Pavers completing the project in time — and getting the Kansas Guard fully operational again. The facility is now used for 10 helicopter pads for the Kansas Army National Guard’s UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters. A thicker concrete area allows heavier transport planes, such as the National Guard’s KC-135 refuelling aircraft when required.