CE-241, Planning and Design of Airports Fifth Edition

Abstract

I n the preface to the fourth edition of this text, the late Dr. Francis McKelvey remarked that the technological and legislative developments related to the air transportation industry in the 1980s and early 1990s were of such significance that an updating of the book was needed. The fourth edition, published in 1994, enhanced previous editions, the first of which was published in 1962. In the 16 years since this last update, it may be said that the changes to the practice of airport planning and design have been more significant than in any other era in the history of aviation. Implementation of twenty-first-century technologies has resulted in the first major overhaul to aircraft and air navigation systems in generations, computer-based analytical and design models have replaced antiquated monographs and estimation tables, and highly significant geopolitical events have all but rewritten the rules of planning, designing, and operating civil-use airports. These significant enhancements to the aviation system have resulted in unique challenges in creating an updated fifth edition of this important and highly accepted text. While every attempt was made to keep to the traditional structure of the book and to preserve the theoretical strengths for which it is most well known, much of the material in the previous edition required more replacement than simply being made current. Within this latest edition the reader will find, for example, new and entirely different strategies to estimate required runway lengths and their associated required pavement thicknesses. This text attempts to maintain the flavor of previous editions while understanding, for example, that airport navigational aids of the previous century are becoming all but obsolete, in favor of a digital, satellite-based communication and navigational system, and that airport financing strategies are in a revolutionary state, given anticipated changes to federal aviation funding mechanisms. Updating this edition has, in fact, been a continuous “race against time,” as important changes to the aviation system were constantly occurring during the process.