b'8 STLRUNWAYSFinish Line in Sight at St. Louis Lambert Intl BY MIKE SCHWANZA major rehabilitation of the main runway at St. Louismanager, airlines, FBOs, Boeing and the FAA, among others, Lambert International Airport (STL) is nearing completion.Beckmann relates. Eventually, we agreed to do this in two phases.Runway 12R-30L, which handles about 40% of thePhase One was completed last year, from April to late airports flight operations, is scheduled to reopen sometime inSeptember. Phase Two, which is expected to wrap up soon, November after being closed for the last two construction seasons. started in March 2023. The massive $85 million project involved tearing out and replacing large stretches of existing pavement that had reached itsComplex Projectend of life; narrowing the width of the entire runway by 50 feet; andThe airport commissioned Crawford, Murphy & changing the geometry of several taxiways.Tilly as the chief design and engineering firm for The need for this project had been evidentthis endeavor. Project Manager/Chief Designer for several years, so airport officials had timeAngela Franklin and her team were responsible to prepare for it. We did a full reconstructionfor construction, electrical, drainage work,ANGELA FRANKLINof the western third of this runway in 2012;etc. This was a very complicated project, and even back then, we knew we had to dosays Franklin. Usually, one of our design plans is about 150 pages the rest of the runway within 10 years or so,long. This one ended up being 700 pages long. Basically, our states Gerald Beckmann, the airports deputyGERALD BECKMANN team was overseeing several projects in one, including a runway director for Planning and Development.reconstruction, a runway narrowing, several taxiway reconstruction projects and extensive electrical work.This current project focuses on the eastern and middle sections of the critical runway. Planning how to perform the workIn addition to addressing the pavement condition, Crawford, as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible required a lot ofMurphy & Tilly was instrumental in the airfield component of the coordination.airports master plan (led by WSP) to re-envision the preferred airfield configuration. This was largely driven by FAAs recentIn 2020 and 2021, we had many meetings with all thechanges in airfield geometric standards. The runway project was stakeholders, including the engineering firm, the construction October 2023AirportImprovement.com'