Shreveport Regional Airport, Rehabilitation of Electrical Airfield Infrastructure

Aging infrastructure and equipment are an underlying cause to system failures which impacts operational safety. All systems and equipment have useful lives and when operated beyond those lives, the risk of failure and safety increases. It is paramount an airport tracks and plans for the systematic replacement of infrastructure and equipment to avoid a mass replacement in the event of failures.

Burns, in partnership with the Shreveport Airport Authority, investigated the airports’ existing infrastructure and equipment and developed a replacement and improvement plan of their airfield ground lighting (AGL) systems.

Burns identified issues and deficiencies such as overloaded AGL circuits, aging and direct buried airfield lighting series conductors and connectors, poor performing AGL circuits, and the lack of circuit configuration for redundancy and resiliency.

As part of the rehabilitation program, Burns performed a cost benefit and load analysis for the conversion to LED lighting systems and developed design for new visual NAVAIDS, infrastructure system, reconfiguration of AGL circuits and the addition of airfield vault distribution equipment.

Understanding the FAA and airport’s available funding process, Burns evaluated all the proposed work and developed a phased approach to accomplish. The work was evaluated based on need of repair and then subdivided into four projects with a focus of need and enabling of the next project.

To maintain concurrency from design to implementation, Burns was retained as Construction Manager responsible for all construction management duties including onsite management, client representative, technical oversight, and inspection. The program laid the foundation to the successful installation and modernization of the airfield systems and placed the airport on a path of preventive maintenance methodology and safety and risk mitigation.