Applicability of PAVEAIR for Airport Pavement Management: Comparison between Military and Civilian Runways

Nowadays, globalization has become essential, and interconnection between people and cargo has become necessary due to international trade and investment. In this context, aviation is an important modal because of its efficiency in security, range, and speed; however, the aerodrome infrastructure capacity is not always sized according to the demand and safety regulations required during operations. The number of runway occurrences in Brazil increased considerably since 2011. These occurrences are consequences of several contributing factors, of which runway conditions and airport infrastructure can be considered the most important; however, the quality of runways and the flight safety they provide can’t be quantified through direct statistics. Adhering to a high standard of airfield quality while also knowing airport infrastructure, a study that applies an evaluation of the Pavement Condition Index (PCI) methodology has been developed. First, the airfield pavement at a military base was analyzed and later compared to the results found in a civil airfield study done by another author. The methods used to identify distress in the pavement’s surface were based on ASTM D 5340-12, as are PCI calculations. Secondly, the system was infused into PAVEAIR-FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) to apply an airport management method at a military base to compare the results obtained by other authors for a civil airfield study, where it was intended to analyze the performance characteristics of the runway for each type use. Subsequently, one can obtain subsidies of decisions for the optimization of resources used in airfield maintenance and rehabilitation, and increase operational safety.