The Runway Improvement Project
The Old Runway
January 2010: The runway is covered with a layer of fine gravel and sand. During the winter months it gets a little mushy, and in the summer it gets dusty depending on the weather conditions. It has been a good surface to fly from, as it does not drag the plane down like grass, and it does slow the plane better than landing on a paved runway. It has served us well since we started flying here in the spring of 2006.
The Plan
The club has decided that we are going to install a Geo-Textile mat runway. The mat is a woven 36 mil thick polypropylene fabric. We are going to use three 300 x 15 ft rolls to make a runway surface 450 long and 30 ft wide. We will leave some runoff area at the ends and will probably plant that in grass. The mat will be secured with staples. We have already procured the mat and will be starting soon on the installation.
The New Runway
On 2/27/2010 we prepped the surface by grading and rolling and then started rolling out the fabric. It was decide after rolling out the first roll that we would rather go three rolls wide with the runway. This gave us a 45ft wide x 300ft runway surface.
We used wire staples and 8" nails to secure the fabric to the ground. In some areas we could only get the nails to go in because of the hard dirt and rock. We could tell the fabric was already shrinking as we was laying it out. The hardest part of the job was pounding in all of those staples and nails. We tried to keep all the staples and nails at least two feet apart. The material was overlapped about six inches.
We will be adding another roll to the end to make the overall length of the runway 400 feet.
