I’m currently standing in the middle of one of the busiest runways in the world.
But don’t worry it’s all good, it’s currently shut because construction teams
back there behind me to resurface it before tomorrow’s planes touch down pretty much
where I’m standing.
Now that plane has already taken off and is currently in the air on its way here, so the
race is seriuosly on.
Now we know that resurfacing a runway bit by bit each night for over 3 kilometres might
sound like the world’s most boring construction projects.
But this is no ordinary bit of road laying.
It’s a critical piece of infrastructure that millions of people, thousands of businesses,
the UK’s wider economy and airports around the world all depend on.
The stakes are insanely high, and what this team is trying to pull off in such a tight
time frame puts them in a different league of pressure.
If a piece of the runway breaks out and ends up in an aircraft engine, the results are
potentially catastrophic, because there's no room for a mistake.
If you’ve ever travelled into London, you’re probably familiar with Gatwick Airport.
It’s one of the UK’s busiest, home to more than 50 airlines, flying to more than
200 destinations.
But when it was first opened in the 1930s, it was just a small flyers club.
Over the years it’s been used as a public aerodrome, Royal Air Force base and in the
1950s it was renovated and officially opened as London’s second airport.
For a while, Gatwick was run by a government agency.
But in the 80s, it was privatised and had to start finding its own revenue.
Since its official opening, Gatwick has gone from seeing less than half a million people
pass through each year, to more than 45M at its peak in 2019.
But traffic took a huge hit from the pandemic in 2020.
Just look at how aircraft traffic around Gatwick plummeted in March alone.
To say that’s been bad for business would be putting it lightly.
For two years, Gatwick was losing roughly £1M per day on average.
Losses like that makes construction projects like this a tough sell for a business that
needs to cut costs.
But as travellers start to return to the skies, Gatwick is in full swing working to return
to full capacity.
It’s difficult to overstate just how much goes in to making every travel experience
possible.
Throughout this 1,600 acre campus there are people issuing tickets, checking passports,
monitoring the weather, directing air traffic and so much more.
And being here with the team up close and going behind the scenes shows me that the
work never really stops.
There are just a few hours where the constant flow of planes slows.
And even then, there are hundreds of people working to get ready for the next rush to
begin the following morning.
Of course, the runway is the backbone of this whole operation.
Without it, the airport becomes more like a shopping mall with a car park.
If this single stretch of asphalt is out of service, the whole thing is thrown off.
Flights get delayed, terminals get crowded, baggage claim gets backed up and pretty soon
you have a whole lot of stressed out travellers.
Gatwick has two terminals, the North and the South.
But there’s just one massive runway for all incoming and outgoing flights, making
Gatwick the busiest single-runway airport in the world.
There is a second smaller runway that’s on standby, but it’s currently only used
in case of emergencies.
The main runway stretches 3,337 metres long and 44 metres wide.
That’s the size of more than 1,400 tennis courts.
It was built in the 1950s with concrete, and has been paved over with new asphalt over
the years.
But it wasn’t designed to last forever, and it’s starting to crumble.
On a busy day, the main runway can handle more than 950 arrivals and departures.
At some points, 55 planes are flying in and out of Gatwick every hour.
That means flight paths need to be meticulously coordinated around the availability of the
runway.
On a typical summer day, the runway will see an ebb and flow of departures and arrivals
of the smaller planes from across Europe, and the bigger long-haul flights from around
the world.
Squeezed in between the waves of traffic, a gap is created for the maintenance crew
to rush in and make sure there’s no debris or birds around the runway.
To make planning even more complicated, everything can change with a shift of the breeze.
Planes actually work best if they’re flying into the wind.
So if the wind is blowing to the west, everyone flies in and out of the east.
But if the direction of the wind changes in the evening, everything flips to the other
direction.
Since there are so many planes to coordinate, air traffic control coordinates the switch
in a time window that will cause the least disruption.
While the switch is happening, planes fly in circles in designated areas just outside
the airport until all the traffic is rerouted.
It’s a 24 hour operation, and the margin for error is tight, which means any issues
with the runway will cause a knock on effect for everyone.
But the runway is starting to show its age, and if left untreated it would pose a threat
to the safety of everyone flying.
And with tens of thousands of people relying on this one piece of asphalt every day, making
repairs is a race against the clock.
So Gatwick has an incredibly busy runway.
It's those up to 950 aircraft movements on a busy day.
55 movements an hour in the middle of the day.
So you can imagine that takes quite a pounding on the surface as all those aircraft take
off and land.
So what we're doing here is replacing the surface of the runway to make it last for
about another seven or eight years.
thought publishing a YouTube video every week was tough, but this is an entirely new realm
of deadline pressure.
For three months, the construction team at Gatwick is working with military precision
to repave the runway from 9:30 PM to 5:30 AM every night.
You know, the stakes are really important.
All of our airlines expect us to deliver the schedule every day.
So all of them will be queuing up at 6:30 in the morning, waiting to get on that runway,
to get off and to deliver their day.
And if we don't hang that runway back on time, the airline schedules are screwed for the
rest of the day.
This will be the fifth time the Gatwick runway is rehabilitated.
It was last resurfaced in 2012, and it’s due for another upgrade.
This new batch of asphalt is designed to last around seven years.
They’re focusing the most resilient asphalt on the bits of the runway that planes traffic
the most.
It's not just your standard asphalt that gets stuck on the road outside your house or the
pavement you walk down every day.
So you've got a really high specification material, which is why we have to build a
bottling plant on site behind us so that we can batch the material here ourselves.
This isn’t just any old construction project, we’re talking about an airport here, which
means there is a lot of security.
Before anyone, including us at the B1M, can get to the construction site, you have to
pass through the same airport security as if you were flying.
That means every night, more than 100 people and 40 trucks full of materials have to be
screened before any work can begin.
Probably not a good idea to show up late for this shift.
And because there’s not much room for anyone, or any materials, to show up late, the team
at Gatwick actually built their own supply chain just off the runway.
Around 6:30 every night, two brand new asphalt production plants are switched on in prep
for the night shift.
While it may look like the asphalt that’s in front of your house, this batch is made
a lot stronger, since it’ll be pummelled by hundreds of massive aircraft everyday.
About an hour before the overnight planes are rerouted to the backup runway, the construction
team meets before their shift.
Technically this project isn’t that complicated.
The team is ripping up the old asphalt and laying down new material.
It’s the same process that’s used on runway pavements all around the world.
But here at Gatwick, they don’t have the luxury of shifting all their flights to another
runway while construction takes place.
So at 9:30 sharp, a crew of more than 100 people flood the runway and start their race
against time.
Believe it or not this is currently Gatwick Airport’s runway.
It’s the middle of the night but it is a hive of activity here.
Hundreds of people on this construction team are working to take out the old surface of
the runway, lay a new surface and get the runway checked and reopened again before those
planes that are currently in the air start landing.
The work moves in a sequence that’s repeated every night until they get to the end of the
runway.
First the lights that guide pilots to the runway are turned off and removed.
Then a fleet of machines remove the existing asphalt and save it to be recycled.
Next comes a fleet of paving machines that lay two new layers of asphalt.
The biggest challenge is making sure it dries in time before the morning shift.
And being in London, the rain is your enemy.
Once the new asphalt is laid, a team of electricians work to put all the lighting back in so it’s
ready for the next day.
Now, this is all happening in a matter of hours every night while flights are landing
just over 100 metres away on the backup runway, and a queue of EasyJet planes are lining up
just off the construction site to carry the first passengers of the day.
If the team gets any more than 15 minutes off track, they need to move straight into
one of the many contingency plans that are kept in a playbook.
Before we went into this project, we did a wargaming activity where we sat for weeks
in rooms coming up with every conceivable failure you could possibly come up with.
// And all of that in a normal job.
Would you do it?
No.
But when every 15 minutes is critical, actually having the solution and not having to stand
there for half an hour and work out what it is, is the difference between failure and
success.
If they’re even a few minutes late cleaning up, or the asphalt isn’t totally cooled,
there will be a lot of angry airlines and passengers waiting to get moving.
Just a little bit of pressure.
Sure, paving a runway bit by bit every night might not seem like a lot, but the scale of
this project is astounding.
Millions of people use this runway every year, and the entire airport operation needs to
be in sync with the construction schedule.
If one group is off, the entire operation could shut down, and nobody would get off
the ground.
And Gatwick’s ambitions go beyond just this runway.
Remember that backup runway they have in case of emergencies?
Well, they’re in the proposal phase of turning that into a fully-functional second runway.
The plan to use the second runway has been in the works for years now, and it’s faced
a lot of opposition from people who say the added noise and air pollution and traffic
would be bad for the region.
But it would make construction projects like this a whole lot easier, and it would allow
for even more flights to pass through here every day.
All the time, we have to be really focused on the fact that we're here to deliver a service
for our airlines.
And if we don't do that, it has impacts that can literally go worldwide.
And that's quite sobering when you start thinking about it.
That's why sometimes I try and avoid thinking about it too much.
But yeah, that's just how interconnected worldwide aviation is.
One runway resurfacing can knock on around the world.
Getting to spend the night with construction teams like this is a really humbling experience.
What looks like a simple bit of resurfacing isn’t that, it’s a major operation that’s
been months in the planning and has taken hundreds of people to organise.
The work these guys are doing is depended on by millions of passengers, hundreds of
businesses and the wider economy
And for me reunderlines once again the impact of this industry.
It touches every single part of our lives and enables so much of our world to happen.
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