After completion of a six-month long revamp worth $400M, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, USA has reopened the major runway at John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK), in Queens, New York, USA. Thomas Bosco, Port Authority Aviation Director said, “With cooperation from our airline partners and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the past six months of continuous work on Runway 4Left-22Right will prove to pay huge dividends in terms of operational safety and efficiency over the coming decades at JFK.”
The project was executed in three phases. It included an addition of a high-speed taxiway to reduce ground delays by enabling the arriving aircrafts to exit the runway faster, allowing other planes to touchdown or takeoff on the same runway with greater frequency.
The modernization project involved lengthening the runway safety zones at each end of the landing strip to 1,000 ft to provide extraoverrun areas in case of aircraft emergencies—a per the upgraded FAA regulations. In addition, the runway was widened from 150 ft to 200 ft to accommodate the world’s largest passenger aircraft. The runway stretches more than two
miles from the Rockaway Boulevard to a peninsula extending into Jamaica Bay. It now has an 18-in thick concrete surface that was built using a total of 220,000 tons of concrete to replace the runway’s previous base of asphalt.
The airport serves more than 54 million passengers annually. All four runways of the JFK Airport are in full use now for the first time since the spring this year, when the work began. The concrete runway is expected to have a lifespan of about 40 years.
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