GMR Hyderabad International Airport Ltd has completed the first phase of the pavement preservation of its main runway, which extends its life for several more years.

The airport has used Airport Grade Steel Guard (AGSG) technology, which is an asphalt protective coat application designed to preserve and extend the life of existing asphalt pavement surfaces. This has quick-setting feature, which enables the runway to take the load of normal air traffic after 2 hours of application in day-time and 45 minutes in between the layers’ application.

The first phase of the project has taken care of almost one-third of the runway. During this 6-hour window, all air traffic movement was switched to the secondary runway with absolutely no impact on airport operations.

Since the innovative AGSG technology does not incur excavation of the pavement, the main runway was fully operational before and after the activity every day till the project got over.

SGK Kishore, CEO, GHIAL, in a statement said, “Keeping an eye on advancements in airport technologies globally, we have been adopting new and proven practices to continuously enhance our operational excellence. Along similar lines, we have adopted a new, proven and patented Airport Grade Steel Guard technology for preserving our decade-long main runway.”

The effectiveness of this technology was experienced during the recent tyre-burst incident of an IndiGo aircraft, wherein not a single portion of the main runway was impacted due to this incident. Asphalt airfield pavements particularly runways are subject to various stresses that result in the subsequent deterioration of asphalt pavements.

GMR airport engaged vendors based in Mumbai and the technology implemented is provided by a US-based firm. This helped the airport to complete the project in less than 15 days as against the conventional mode of runway preservation, which would have taken more than 3 months to finish.