Fadi Azab is a Senior Project Engineer with more than eight years of civil aviation design, civil/site design and construction management experience. Working out of IEI’s New York office, Fadi’s recent success on LaGuardia’s Airport Runway/Taxiway Rehabilitation project enhances IEI’s portfolio of skilled engineers with aviation engineering experience. IEI’s skilled and experienced teams are passionate about project challenges, and innovative ways of solving problems. Airfield design projects, in particular, present significant challenges. At first glance, runway/taxiway rehabilitation projects may appear to be simple, but busy airports like LaGuardia, can present a number of complex project challenges:
- Civil Design
Civil Engineering is often the lead discipline in airfield design projects, with electrical engineering being second in terms of scope. Civil design involves heavy use of Civil 3D software to prepare Alignments, Profiles, and 3D model surfaces of the proposed Runway and associated Taxiways as well as the design of different pavements for Runway Keel (Airplane landing portion), Runway shoulders, and Taxiways. - Interdisciplinary Design Coordination
While some civil tasks will not require a lot of coordination with other engineering disciplines or airport operations, other tasks require constant coordination. One of the challenges of LGA Runway 4-22 project, is that the north portion of the runway is composed of a structural deck that extend 1800 feet into a body of water. This represented a challenge in placing new lights in the structural deck as Civil Engineering lead the effort of coordination between Electrical and Structural Engineering to ensure that the new light locations have no impact on the structural integrity of the runway deck. - Engineering/Airport Facility Coordination
LGA Airport only has two runways and is going through major redevelopment projects on, both, the landside and airside which makes the design more challenging. For example, to prepare a construction staging plan, the design team has to work early on with Airport Operations and Construction Engineers to ensure that the construction will be staged in a way that has minimal effect on airport operation while still allowing the contractor to complete the project within the proposed schedule.The key to the successful completion of any project is open communication between the various parties involved while identifying and addressing challenges as early as possible in the design process.