Tps Overhauls Isle of Man's Airport Five Months Early and Under Budget

Until recently, the Isle of Man Airport’s main runway end safety areas met only the minimum standards outlined by the new CAA guidelines, falling short of the recommended standards required to minimise risk to aircraft and passengers.

The Aviation division of engineering design and planning specialists TPS has revealed details of their significant safety overhaul at Isle of Man’s only major airport, Ronaldsway. The civil engineering project designed by TPS (part of Carillion plc) to extend the airport’s main Runway End Safety Area (RESA) into the Irish Sea, and extend the runway and parallel taxiway, reached completion five months early and under budget.

The required works took place to ensure compliance with the UK's specialist aviation regulator, the United Kingdom Civil Aviation Authority’s (CAA) revised recommendations for UK runway safety requirements.

The project, designed, managed and now completed by TPS has not only enhanced future safety for existing aircraft and passengers using the airport facilities, but now also enables mid size short-to-medium range airliners such as Airbus A320 and Boeing 737 jets to operate at the airport with full payloads, thanks to improvements to the existing facilities and main runway.

Gerry Prickett, Project Manager at TPS Consult, explains: “Previously, if landing aircraft came in short or overshot on approaching the existing runway they faced a difficult challenge in landing safely, particularly in a seaward direction.”

TPS’s solution was to design an extension out to sea by creating a gravity rock armour structure, approximately 250 metres in length and 150 metres wide.

John Veale, concept structural designer, explains: “The structure, which stands at a height of 12 metres, is effectively a land reclamation gained by taking sand from deep in the Irish Sea to create a sand in-filled gravity structure. The gravity rock armour protecting the RESA gravity structure from sea erosion and wave damage actually uses the largest rock on a project undertaken in the British Isles.”

The RESAs at each end of the 08-26 Runway now meet the full recommendations of CAP 168 Chapter 3 paragraph 5, which sets down the recommended dimensions to be at least 240m long by 150m wide.

In addition to increasing safety of the existing main runway, TPS’s design team, headed by Nick Pell, extended its usable length by designing and installing ‘starter strips’, which enable the use of the runway by the smaller commercial passenger jet aircraft such as those used by Easyjet.

TPS also completed an extension of the existing main runway’s parallel taxiway as well as strengthening the runway to handle these larger commercial aircraft.

Other work completed by TPS under this same contract included replacement of electrical aeronautical ground lighting such as runway lights, taxiway lights, approach lights. This design was headed by Henk Esterhuryse, Principal Electrical Engineer.

To improve construction ‘buildability’ and in order to assist with logistics, TPS approved the use of runway surfacing material to a French standard - only used once before in the British Isles - and in the process developed a specification to achieve high standards of quality control of this product.

Critical to these runway works was the need to work only during the airport’s normal night-time closures and to ensure that flights could recommence on schedule at 6am each morning. All new components, including a large runway drainage crossing, were designed specifically to achieve this objective.