Evaluation of as-built airfield hangar slab capacity under wide body aircraft

The paper describes an investigation of the structural loading performance of a newly constructed concrete slab in an airfield hangar facility under wide body aircraft. It was determined during this investigation that the prepared soil subgrade did not meet the design requirements. This in-turn became problematic when installing the unbound aggregate subbase which required a very high compaction effort in order to meet the design modulus of subgrade reaction. To assess the as-built capacity of the slab, a detailed investigation was undertaken which included measuring the deflection of the slab and joint under parked wide body aircraft such as the Boeing 777, as well as a series of subgrade soil and pavement testing activities. The measured field evaluation data were used in numerical analyses to determine the ability of the reinforced concrete slab to handle repeated loading from housed aircraft. The analysis findings demonstrated that the concrete pavement would perform satisfactorily.