Airport runway shut down for pothole repairs
When a road gets a pothole, motorists grin, bump and bear their way through it.
When an airport runway gets a pothole, everything comes to a screeching halt.
Greater Moncton International Airport's runway 29 was out of service for about 14 hours from Thursday evening through to Friday morning when an asphalt patch on the runway came loose after a plane took off.
"We had to shut down operations on that runway until we could get it repaired," says Chris Farmer, the airport's director of operations.
The damage occurred at around 9 p.m. Thursday night and four passenger flights scheduled to land that evening had to be diverted, three to Fredericton, one to Halifax.
The airport has a second runway, which was still open and is long enough for the Air Canada Jazz, WestJet, and Continental Airlines flights to land. But it is not long enough to permit the planes to take off again, meaning the planes would have been stranded in Moncton until the repair was made.
Farmer says about 270 passengers were impacted Thursday evening and more would have seen their travel plans changed Friday morning because the planes they were scheduled to leave on were not in the city and couldn't have taken off if they had been.
Porter Airlines flights and Air Canada Jazz flights using Dash-8s were not affected as the smaller planes are able to both land and take off from the shorter runway.
Farmer says they are not sure what caused the patch on the runway to let go, though they suspect this week's high temperatures may have caused it to loosen.
The patch was repaired by 11 a.m. on Friday and operations at the airport were able to resume as normal. Farmer says things could have been worse but for the construction project currently under way at the airport.
"Because we were doing construction, we actually had a paving contractor on site. If we hadn't had one on site, we would have been shut down for a day or two trying to get a paving contractor in here. Trying to get a paving contractor in here at this time of year, good luck."
The contractor was not able to make the repair Thursday evening because the asphalt plant had shut down for the day.
Farmer says the incident is a good reminder of why the airport has begun a three-year plan to rebuild its runways.
The intersection of the two runways is being redone this year and the long runway, the one that was damaged Thursday, will be repaved next year.
