More than 200 engineers and technicians spent 29 weeks working overnight from 11pm to 5:30am to resurface Heathrow Airport’s Southern Runway, which measures 3659m in length and 50m in width.
The work all had to be completed at night when no flights were scheduled. From 6am onwards, the first planes are scheduled to take off and land on the runway again, meaning all works had a tight nightly deadline.
The resurfacing works are part of a 100 million GBP investment in the airfield in 2024. The last time the runway was resurfaced was in 2014. There are around 1,300 take offs and landings every day at the airport. The most common type of aircraft weigh around 200 tonnes and are travelling 140mph when they touch down. This results in 5–10kg of rubber being left on the runway from the aircraft tyres.
The resurfacing project took four years to plan – including investigation, design, procurement and mobilisation.
For 29 weeks, a night shift team accessed the runway between 11pm and 5:30am. During this window, around 850 tonnes of asphalt was removed and replaced. Each nightshift saw more than 120 heavy vehicles and equipment and more than 150 operatives deployed. There was also complex planning with airfield operations, NATS, security and Heathrow Engineering.
The resurfacing work, which was completed by engineering and construction company VolkerFitzpatrick, was commenced in April and completed in October. The work involved:
- laying around 50,000 tonnes of asphalt
- replacing around 1,100 runway lights with more energy-efficient LEDs
- cutting more than seven million metres of grooves into the surface for drainage
- upgrading 22 entry exit taxiways and the runway shoulders – almost the same surface area as the runway itself
All the material was brought to the local Colnbrook centre by rail, as part of the airport’s sustainability goals. Only the final airside journey was done by road. 70,000 tonnes of discarded asphalt has been taken to be processed and reused in local road resurfacing or for other projects across the country.
Gawaine Yates, Delivery Project Manager, said:We’ve invested over £4 billion from 2022 into 2026 to make Heathrow an extraordinary airport, and the runway resurfacing project is just the latest project to make that a reality. It's an unbelievably interesting project – something of this scale is very complex and clearly comes with a number of potential operational challenges. Everything has been carefully planned for minimum impact and maximum benefit, we wanted to complete the work as quickly and safely as possible. Ensuring the runway is in the best possible condition is key for our airport in ensuring we make every journey better for passengers and maintain our high standards.
The weather and visibility conditions between April and October are better than between October and April. Hence, work to resurface the Northern Runway is planned to start in April 2025.
