Design of Emergency Airstrip on an Expressway in India

Highway strip/airstrip is the concept of using part of a road as an airstrip during exigencies. These airstrips are of extreme importance for rescue operations at times of war, natural calamities, and critical accidents. This paper focuses on the design of an airstrip for a stretch of 3200 m on the proposed Samajwadi Purvanchal Expressway connecting Agra and Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, India, for emergency landing of combat jets of the Indian Air Force (IAF). FAARFIELD software was used for the designing of this road runway. Both flexible and rigid pavements were designed as per the FAA advisory circular (AC) guidelines "Airport Pavement Design & Evaluation (150/5320-6E)," for a design life of 20 years. Single Wheel-75 was selected as the design aircraft with a gross weight of 40,000 kg (40 ton) and tire pressure of 973 kPa. From the resultant thicknesses, it was observed that the designed pavement thicknesses were less than that required for the road pavement, for the given stretch, for both flexible and rigid pavements using similar materials. Hence, it was concluded that the expressway was structurally adequate to be considered as the airstrip in case of an emergency. However, it was proposed to construct the surface layer with stone matrix asphalt (SMA) to reduce rutting along the wheel path of the trucks.