Integrated Pavement Evaluations for Smyrna Airport

The Smyrna Airport (Smyrna), located 17.7 km (11 miles) south of Nashville, TN, was recently approached by a European shipping company that was looking to locate a hub airport somewhere in the central United States. The shipper anticipated using DC10, L1011, and B747 aircraft on a nearly daily basis within 2 years of starting operations. It was uncertain how the existing pavements at Smyrna would perform with this dramatic change in anticipated aircraft fleet mix. A standard pavement management system (PMS) implementation, which would normally be able to predict future pavement deterioration rates, would fall short in this scenario because changes in the fleet mix would alter the rate of structural deterioration. Therefore, a pavement evaluation was performed on the airside pavements at Smyrna to determine: 1) Current condition of the pavements at the network level. 2) Structural capacity of selected pavements at the project level. 3) Remaining life of selected pavements based on the proposed aircraft fleet. This paper presents the processes that were developed for Smyrna.