“Over half (55 percent) of municipalities are extremely small with populations [of] less than 500 residents; 13 percent are less than 100 residents,” the report says.

The primary exceptions are the City and Borough of Juneau, City of Fairbanks, Fairbanks North Star Borough, Kenai Peninsula Borough, Mat-Su Borough, and Municipality of Anchorage.

The largest airport, an economic driver in Anchorage that employs about one in ten people in the municipality, is the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport.

Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport (the world’s fifth-busiest cargo airport) is undergoing its second year of critical infrastructure work after resurfacing and widening taxiway Romeo last year. This year, construction continues on one of the airports three runways—the North-South runway—and begins on another taxiway, repaving and widening the surfaces.

“The pavement of the runway has met its useful life; it needed to be redone,” says Airport Manager Jim Szczesniak. “So, while we’re doing this project we wanted to make sure we widen the runway to meet the FAA requirements and aircraft needs.”

The need to widen the runway comes with an increase in traffic of the Boeing 747-8 international freighters. The wider runway and taxiways reduce the risk of foreign object debris, caused by jet blast, ending up on the runways and taxiways—potentially causing costly damage to aircraft.

“Jet blast is one of those things we’re always taking into consideration because these jets are capable of producing hurricane force winds at a moment’s notice,” Szczesniak says. “Since the runway is being closed for a significant amount of time, we’re also replacing the runway lighting system with energy efficient LED fixtures and new wiring.”

But a significant change at the airport with regard to ensuring aircraft and passenger safety is a slight shift in the runway’s location.

“We’re just going to move it 200 feet. So there isn’t really any noticeable change from the outside-the-fence perspective, but we’ll deconflict the runway safety areas,” Szczesniak says.

Runway safety areas at the airport consist of 1,000-foot sections beyond the runway that need to be cleared and graded so that, in the event of an aircraft going off the runway, there is essentially a large grass field for the plane to travel into.

Deconflicting the safety areas, in some ways, is fine tuning a push in Alaska back in 2000 to update safety areas, especially at small, rural airports.

“Some of these places you’d fly into in Alaska early on, they’d have almost no safety area or they’d have very little safety area,” Limb says.

The move was driven by Congress after Southwest Airline Flight 1248 went off the runway at Chicago Midway International Airport, crashing into automobile traffic and killing a six-year-old boy.

The changes at Ted Stevens International Airport would mean that—in the extraordinarily unlikely scenario that two planes entered their runway’s safety area at the same time—they would not collide.

To accommodate construction, the runway is expected to remain shut down for the remainder of the summer.

Unlike Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, most airports in Alaska do not have the luxury of alternative runways; few even have parallel taxiways that can be converted into runways to allow contractors free reign during the construction process.

“For runways specifically, especially at an airport like Kotzebue, for example, where there are no roads to the adjacent communities, you have to keep that runway open,” Limb says. “Not only do we have to keep it open, we have to keep it open to all air traffic.”

Per the Federal Aviation Administration’s 150/5370-2G Operational Safety on Airports During Construction advisory circular, a runway must be closed until construction is complete or the runway is returned to a state in which aircraft can safely operate, Limb explains. Because of the additional barriers to construction often present in rural Alaska, construction could stretch on for years depending on the level of rehabilitation needed.

With no secondary runways, or even taxiways or roads that could be converted into temporary landing strips for aircraft during the construction period, Stantec and other designers turn toward half-width operations.

Through project phasing, a runway is split longitudinally down the middle. This allows the contractor to close half the runway during construction while the other half remains open to air traffic. However, when personnel are actively working on even the closed half, the entire runway is closed to aircraft operations to assure safety.

“What we end up doing a lot of times is that any time the contractor is actually on the airport the runway is closed. That requires us to work outside the normal hours of airport operations,” Limb says. “We have the contractor working after the last jet has gone for the day and before the first jet comes in the morning.”

Limb explains that in 2012, the FAA’s Office of Airport Safety and Standards released its Runway Half Width Operation Construction Guidance memo to the Alaska Airports Regions Division Office listing the requirements to allow half-width operations.

According to the memo, if the airport has a second runway of sufficient capability, a taxiway that can be converted into a sufficient runway, or there are other viable, year-round modes of transportation to outside communities, the FAA will not allow half-width operations.

On the other hand, if the complete closure of the runway will have unacceptable impacts on the community or prevent medevac flights, a strong argument can be made for half-width operations.

“FAA will review all factors and make a final determination if half-width operations are warranted,” Limb says.

These FAA rules and regulations, however, only apply in the public-use realm and when contractors are using federal dollars. Of course, Alaska has many places that are not “official” landing strips.

“There’s a differentiation here when you talk Bush pilots versus airports in the Bush,” Limb notes. “If you’re talking flying into Bush communities where they have a community there and we have a runway there, that’s one thing. However, Bush pilots pride themselves in doing what they call off-airport operations. As long as they have enough room to land and have an aircraft that can handle the terrain, they can make almost any place a landing spot.”

Additionally, private airports are not regulated the same way as public airports. Most public-use airports in the state are owned by DOT, in total 239.

“DOT does airport capital improvement projects using the Airport Improvement Program, funds from the FAA, and those funds usually cover about 95 percent of the cost, but they come with strings,” Limb says.

Some of these strings are attached to what are known as “imaginary surfaces,” which are meant to prevent existing or proposed manmade objects, natural objects, or terrain from extending into navigable airspace.

“Unless you’re dealing with a contractor who has done a lot of airport work, they don’t know about these things,” Limb says. “Airports have a lot of invisible protection areas we’ve got to look at: can’t park equipment too close, can’t have things sticking up that might hit wings.”

Establishing clear safety areas is what led to the FAA requesting a $38 million project in Aniak in which the entire 6,000-foot runway is being moved.

The issue is that there are multiple penetrations into the runway’s 800-foot-wide object free area, including the town’s power plant, private homes, a perimeter fence, a road, and multiple buildings onsite, Limb explains.

“It’s a massive undertaking, but it’s all in the name of safety,” explains Limb, who is part of the Stantec team undertaking the project. “One of the things we hear people saying is there has never been an accident here, so the runway is safe. But lack of an incident or accident doesn’t mean that the runway is necessarily safe. If it doesn’t meet FAA safety standards, it doesn’t meet standards—and it needs to.”

Last year saw the contractors relocating the roads and primary electrical systems ahead of moving the runway this year. The relocation also includes building turnaround taxiways instead of the “elephant ear” turnarounds normally provided.

In general, taxiways—when economically feasible—are important for airport safety as they allow planes to position themselves for takeoff without increasing their time on the runway itself.

“Once we move the runway, then the FAA is going to be rebuilding the Instrument Landing System, that includes the localizer and glide slope antennas, and the weather station that tells pilots what the weather conditions are like out there in Aniak,” Limb says.

The most recent safety push in the industry—especially for Alaska airports—has been providing airports with instrument landing procedures to make for safer flying in inclement weather, Limb says, noting that the Last Frontier is no stranger to bad weather.

To do this, Stantec and others conduct aeronautical surveys, photographing the airports.

“We’ll do 3D modeling on them, and we’ll identify obstructions to give a really complete map to FAA so they can design instrument approach procedures for pilots,” Limb says. “So, if the weather does close in on them, they can get into communities safely.”

Alaska’s weather is hard on pilots and is very hard on runways—especially asphalt runways—which is why many airports in the state aren’t paved.

“Pavement is a big thing. Pavement is very expensive, especially when you’re talking about Alaska and building runways in the Bush,” Limb says. “When you get to Bush communities, many of those community runways are unpaved. They operate propeller driven aircraft into those communities. And the props can easily operate on those kinds of surfaces.”

However, if an airport supports jet traffic, it’s essential for the runways and taxiways to be paved.

“Ingesting a rock into an engine can cause millions of dollars of cost to the airline and possibly the state itself,” Limb says.

In many remote airports, daily operations are so low that the cost justification—and type of aircraft coming in—for pavement isn’t there. However, in Alaska hub airports, such as Kotzebue, Nome, and Utqiaġvik where people catch flights into surrounding Bush communities, asphalt runways are necessary. But for most other rural communities gravel is the economic option.

“One of the advantages of not having asphalt in the community is that it’s just easier to maintain,” Limb says, noting that while the freeze-thaw cycle in Alaska is tough on pavement, gravel runways are easily regraded.

Millions of dollars of improvements—the vast majority of which are federal dollars—this year alone are pushing the state forward in providing the safest air travel possible.

“Someplace like Alaska, where we have so many pilots, so many planes per capita, it’s essential we’re doing everything possible to get home safely,” Limb says.