"DIA's sixth runway is taking shape"

Friday, May 24, 2002

DIA's sixth runway is taking shape
16,000-foot landing strip will cost $166 million
By Kevin Flynn
The Denver (CO) Rocky Mountain News


Seven years after Denver International Airport opened, workers on
Thursday began paving the sixth runway. 

The 16,000-foot runway is scheduled for flight testing in June 2003 and
opening for use three months after that. 

Cut from the project in 1989 as the economy tightened, the sixth runway
will help air traffic controllers balance the flow of planes. 

The new runway will cost $166 million. 

It will also help Mayor Wellington Webb leave office next year with the
last piece of the project under his belt. Delays in opening DIA dogged
his first term and nearly cost him re-election. 

"This has been a long time in coming for us," Webb said as he waved a
checked flag to a paving crew shortly after noon, signaling the first
batch of concrete panels to be poured at the runway's south end. 

The dimensions for DIA's sixth runway were widened to 200 feet from the
original 150 to better accommodate the new super-jumbo jets on the
drawing boards. 

At just over three miles, it will be the second-longest paved landing
strip in the world -- and the longest at any of the world's major
airports. 

The Uppington Airport in South Africa has a 16,076-foot strip. The space
shuttle landing strip at Kennedy Space Center in Florida is 15,000 feet.


The world's longest runway of any kind is the 7.5-mile dry bed of Rogers
Lake at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. 

John F. Kennedy Airport in New York has a 14,572-foot strip built in the
early 1960s for the Boeing 707. The Colorado Springs airport has a
13,500-foot runway, Atlanta's Hartsfield has one at 13,002 feet and
Chicago's O'Hare has one at 13,000 feet. 

DIA's five current runways are each 12,000 feet long. 

The new runway is meant to provide extra takeoff time for heavy jumbo
jets, which need more speed and lift to get off the ground on hot and
dry days at Denver's elevation. 

Even so, experts have long said there may be hot days in Denver when
jumbo jets will have to wait until sundown, no matter how long the
runway is. 

The runway also will allow controllers to maintain a balance of
departing flights when the three current north-south runways are being
used for spacing the bad-weather arrivals. DIA was the first airport in
the world to accommodate three simultaneous bad-weather landings. 

The main contractor is Interstate Highway Construction.


 Do you have an opinion about this story?
Share it with other readers in our CAA Discussion Forums

http://www.californiaaviation.org/cgi-bin/dcforum/dcboard.cgi?conf=DCConfID8

*****************************************