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(rousing music begins) - When the biggest airport in Wyoming undergoes reconstruction, it's no small task.

That's what's happening in 2022 at Jackson Hole Airport.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

We'll be at Jackson Hole Airport, this is "Wyoming Chronicle.

(rousing music continues) (rousing music ends) - [Narrator] Funding for this program is made possible in part by the Wyoming Humanities Council helping Wyoming take a closer look at life through the humanities.

Thinkwy.org and by the members of the Wyoming PBS Foundation.

Thank you for your support.

- We're here at Jackson Hole Airport with the Airport's Executive director Jim Elwood.

Jim, thanks for being with us on "Wyoming Chronicle" today.

Busy time here.

It's a beehive of what we noticed when we walked in.

Tell us what's happening this late spring and early summer at your airport.

- Well major runway reconstruction about a $42 million project, and we've completely removed the old runway and brought it back online.

- Now, let me tell people a little bit about Jackson Hole Airport if our viewers don't understand what we're talking about here.

- Wyoming has nine commercial airports, and Casper, Cody, Laramie, Cheyenne, Rock Springs, Sheridan, Gillette and Riverton combined, boarded about 200,000 passengers total last year.

Maybe a little more than that.

How many did Jackson Hole Airport in plane?

- Yeah, the 2021 figures we had brought on board commercial airplanes, about 500, just over 500,000 passengers.

- So I'm not a mathematician but what that says to me is this airport, which is not in Wyoming's largest city by any means, boards more passengers than all the other airports in Wyoming times two.

So when you're doing a rebuild here it's a major undertaking.

I'm sure everything's gone just like clockwork from the start, right?

- Well, no.

No project of this size ever goes exactly the way you want.

I think it's about planning and trying to anticipate as many of those variables as you can.

Many people know we've had a very wet and sometimes snowy spring here in this part of the state.

So, but we had built enough plans and conditions and circumstances that allowed us to keep the project moving in spite of the weather and other obstacles.

- I remember a construction engineer telling me once, "Well remember, water is a construction material to a point.

Before we came on the air, you mentioned to me the, what you called the granular detail of planning each day not day by day or even daylight hours but down to a much shorter increments than that.

Right?

- Well, to ensure the highest probability of success, we've spent six years really studying this project, and intently the last four.

And out of that planning process, we really felt it was to the advantage to break it down into four hour chunks of time through that whole 78 day window.

So that allowed us to quickly adapt to changing weather conditions or other circumstances that came forward, and, and it really did make the project flow so much better, but it's rare to kind of do that very minute kind of detail work.

- [Steve] Jim Elwood also arranged for Wyoming Chronicle to get a close up view of the new runway with the help of Stewart Schiff, the top engineer on the project.

As we cruised along the runway in late June, he told us the rebuild was almost complete.

- So we're on day number 75 outta 78.

So we're just putting the final touches on this project which you'll see if you look out the window is some top soiling that's being put down.

We have some crews doing some final punch list items that we've put together, and the runway's striped.

Just a few hours ago we did our final flight check procedure on the navigational aids, and that went off really well.

So we're just about ready to open - If there's no easy time to do a big renovation of the largest airport in Wyoming, a regional airport that services Yellowstone, Grand Teton National Parks, the Jackson area, tourism, traffic.

Why now?

- Well, the runway really did need to be replaced.

It had reached the end of its lifespan.

A lot of the base materials had been there since the 1970s so 50 some years.

So we knew this was coming, and that's where our communications to our local partners and stakeholders really mattered.

And, and of course, springtime is the lowest use of this airport, this area for tourism and just general use.

So- - So by that, you mean it's it's this, the ski season is over and the big summer tourism season has not in full swing yet.

- Yeah, exactly.

So it's kind of the sweet spot.

We did close the day that the mountain closed and so that was part of our plan.

And then to be open prior to the 4th of July weekend.

So that's how the 78 days came to be.

- 78 days is relatively short to reconstruct a runway.

- It's wider for one thing but what we're standing on is nothing like a - Yup.

A much beefier pavement section using really high quality materials.

We also have a lot of electrical infrastructure.

- The engineers would've liked, and the contractors would've liked a far longer window than that.

But as a matter of fact, they originally came to me with closure that was well over a hundred days, and we knew that wasn't really practical, and that drove some of the planning that I alluded to earlier, to make sure that we got the most out of every moment of every day that the airport was closed.

- Seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

- That is correct.

- In the middle of a national park.

Again, at Grand Teton National Park is the only national park that has a commercial airport inside it.

And so the complications just pile on with that, I presume.

- You know, it is, and we're so lucky that the Grand Teton National Park and the staff over there are just exceptional people.

You know, they're very committed to, to the sensitivities that we all carry here in this valley, but they really keep and make sure that the, the airport and how we go about doing our businesses meets the standards and expectations of the national park in every way possible.

And in this project that, once again, they were very respectful and understood the need for the work but to do it at a level that really did match the National Park Service expectations.

You were in airport management of a good sized airport in Colorado that was not in a national park.

In terms of the lighting, for example, what's different here?

- Yeah.

When we went to the national park and talked, Grand Teton, to talk about the construction plans and what we needed to do and how we were envisioning it, they gave us a lot of really good ideas about how to to be even more sensitive than perhaps we'd come to on our own.

But the light plants that were needed to work at night were all pointed exactly at the right angle.

We had set those up and understood that there was gonna be glare and night sky impacts.

And so we spent a lot of time actually figuring that out.

Additionally, we've got neighbors nearby in addition to four-legged ones, and we used, instead of the traditional backup alarms for heavy equipment, the beep beep ones we're all familiar with, we used a different technique that sounded a lot more like compressed air being released as a way to soften the impact on the environment and our neighbors, stakeholders, and partners in this project.

- Little things that people wouldn't even think about.

But here you not only do you think about 'em you have to do 'em.

And are and are happy to do it.

- Exactly.

Here being in a national park really sets us to a higher standard.

There's pieces of this project that are incredibly different than a lot of other airports might have gone about this project.

We're the only airport runway that I'm aware of in the world.

It'll have double slot drains on both sides of the runway to collect the surface water from that runway and run it down to a water filtration system that we installed about four years ago.

- So this is a unique element, and when I say unique it's literally unique to the Jackson Hole Airport.

There's no other runway in the country that has this configuration of a storm infrastructure.

So what we're driving down is the runway shoulder and it's a mirror image on the east shoulder.

We're driving down the west shoulder.

And what you'll see if you look outside is two full length slot drain systems.

And these slot drain systems, like I said are unique to this airport.

And what they allow this airport to do is collect all the surface runoff that hits the runway pavement.

That's an, a big environmental initiative.

this airport and this airport board had for this project is to collect all the surface runoff.

That way we can collect it, we send it to our underground detention and treatment system to be treated before it's actually discharged.

The vast majority of air fields in the country surface runoff just runs off the edges of the pavement.

But here, with us being in the national park, we wanted to implement this design to protect this incredibly special resource.

- There's 29,000 linear feed at slot drain in this project, and we're incredibly proud of how that's not a regulatory requirement.

It is a, a commitment though by this airport.

It's governing body, the airport board, and the National Park Service to do the right thing to the very highest level we can possibly consider.

- So over five miles worth of slot drains were put in.

All these slot drains were manufactured in the state of Indiana.

So they're made in America.

Another great aspect of this project by, you know, American, by an American workforce.

- When you're in the airport, you see reference to other just general operational things that have a lower environmental impact than a typical airport this size would have.

- It comes back to that same thing, Steve, that we really feel a direct responsibility for this site, for this economic and environmental location that we have a standard that needs to be met, and we think about that standard, and to raise the bar over any other facility that, that we can take, or we take those best practices.

There's airports around the world that have done creative things, and we are constantly looking to adapt those into our work plan.

- When a person looks at an airport runway being built, it seems like, "Well, there's a road construction project."

But an airport runway is not the same thing as a city street or even an interstate highway, is it?

- No.

The, the standards are, are much, much higher.

- No disrespect to any of the vehicle DOTs.

I'll put it that way, but landing and aircraft takes a whole nother set of standards if you will, just to make sure that aircraft gets safely on the ground.

Very tight tolerances using probably some of the best construction materials we have in terms of civil construction.

- This project also has kind of a unique piece that's been incorporated.

We reused over 90% of the materials that we took out of the old runway, and put them back into the new runway.

- We're able to reuse and recycle about 90 to 95% of the entire existing pavement section.

- [Steve] Fantastic.

- And what that really does, it's again, a big environmental push here.

These are already good materials, they just need to be reused.

And so what we did is we milled up the existing pavement section.

We processed it, we put it back in its place, and depending on the area where we were working, we would stabilize it either mechanically or using additional materials such as cement or asphalt emulsion.

- That saved thousands of heavy truck trips that would've been required otherwise.

And we've calculated upwards of 185,000 gallons of diesel fuel burn, did not need to be burned.

And because of the way we approached that recycling process- We reused, recycled, somewhere between 60, 70,000 cubic yards material which kept approximately 10,000 trucks off our highways.

- And we ended up with even a higher quality project than I think if we hadn't done that way, because of kind of thoughtful planning and, and thinking ahead.

- Very, very cool component.

Very excited about the ability to reuse and recycle materials.

It's becoming, it's...

I wouldn't say it's becoming normal, but it's being explored just from the environmental sustainability perspective.

To do it here in this unique environment is, I think tells the story.

- Every airport construction project must meet modern environmental standards.

But at Jackson Hole Airport, those requirements are even tougher.

- Again, we're in this unique place in Grand Teton National Park.

We can't technically import any top soil so we have to use what we have here.

And so what we're doing is we're taking the top soil that we have, and we're screening it.

We gotta remove the large rocks.

It's again, a safety standard for the FAA, and placing our native top soil back down.

So that's kind of one of the final steps in any construction project or any large civil construction project, is to replace the top soil.

And then once the top soil is placed, we'll proceed to seed it using native Grand Teton National Park seed mix.

- You know, one of the big components of this project is surveying.

Every single layer had to be surveyed and meet tight tolerances that are specified by the FAA.

And they have to be checked and at times rechecked by the surveyors.

So they were out here the entire time working really hard to make sure that all of our grades were met.

- These exacting standards need to be done, because airplanes are landing at high speed and heavy weights on the surface.

And at this port, airport in particular, they're airplanes that don't land anywhere else in Wyoming.

What aircraft land here?

- We're predominantly mainline airplanes from American, Delta, Northwest, Alaska.

And so they're the Airbus 319's, 320's, Boeing 737's, our dominant aircraft throughout the year.

We do have a few smaller airplanes, EMB 175.

- I was scouting the site just a little bit yesterday before we came out today, and I saw a plane land.

It was a jet with a high tail on.

I thought, "Well, here's a rich golfer who gets permission to land early."

But I've since learned that's not what that plane was.

- Thanks for asking the question, Steve.

We did get a couple of phone calls.

We're due to be open on June 28th, and that's not quite that date yet.

That was the FAA has to flight check every navigation A across this airport.

And so there were seven different things that that had changed pre closure to the new runway.

And the FAA has airplanes just a couple of airplanes that are designed to go check each one of those systems.

Mostly navigation aids.

- So what's a navigation aid?

- It's a device that the pilots use to ensure that they know where they are, what's gonna, where they're trying to go to and that that course is absolutely accurate.

- So they check the center line lights, they check the edge lights, you can see those Pappy units.

They're turned off right now but they're pappy units, and there's a precision approach path indicator that helps the plane follow the right path in to land on the runway.

There's also those glide slope antennas, one of the same.

It's an instrument to help the planes get safely on the ground.

And then at the very end, we have what's called a localizer.

And that horizontally speaking helps the plane find center line.

- These sophisticated navigational aids are extra important at this airport because bigger planes are landing on a shorter runway at higher ground altitude.

And in a landscape unlike any other.

- Generally there's not mountains right up against the airport.

And so, just those navids just help ensure that planes safely get on the ground.

- The navigation aids help pilots land in bad weather.

There's also other guidance systems that are on this airport that are also visual.

They all have to be exactly the same to ensure that the traveling public is safe, and that those systems are operating perfectly.

- Another staff member said, if something needs to be tweaked, then the process starts over and he checks out everything again, because you want these planes to be where they're supposed to be.

- That's really the point, Steve.

And I know that fortunately, we can all have great confidence in the accuracy and the quality control that the FAA puts into place for all of these navigation aids and other devices that help pilots be safe.

And you're exactly right, if one little item needs to be adjusted, even to the slightest level, they've gotta go out and make sure that signal, that device is operating perfectly before they'll re-certify it for action.

- Another thing that I'm very proud of and I think the contractor's very proud of is the general smoothness of the runway.

FAA specifications require that runways be exceptionally smooth.

And one of the criteria that the contract, contractor has to adhere to is a profile graph test.

And what a profile graph test does is measures the general smoothness of the pavement surface.

In this case being a runway.

The contractors allowed to have up to 15 inches per mile per 10th of a mile.

And what you guys may have noticed as we've been driving down the runway is that's just that, it's incredibly smooth.

And so after we completed those tests, the average index for this runway was less than one inch per mile per 10th of a mile.

So 15 times less than what they were- - [Steve] That even needed to be.

- Yeah.

- Wow.

- So it's incredibly smooth.

Again, just goes to show the quality of the contractor we had working on this project.

They were pretty exceptional at what they do.

- Not only is Jackson Hole Airport the state'’’s busiest commercial airfield, it'’’s also the snowiest.

Stuart Schiff said snow removal was a priority consideration when the new runway was being built.

- You know, this airport gets almost 200 inches of snow per season, on this ground, and they have to be able to clear that in 10, 15 minutes.

Not the 200 inches, but from just the snowfall they have to clear this entire pavement surface in 10 to 15 minutes.

So they have a very, I'm gonna say awesome, unique fleet of snow removal equipment.

Again, being a single runway configuration here, there's only one run runway to land on.

Whereas other airports may have other runways where they can divert traffic to while they're clearing up the other runway.

This runway is it.

So they, they use snow removal teams have to get out here and remove the snow from the pavement as quick as possible, as efficiently as possible.

- There's a sizable workforce working here during this project.

- We've run about 300 people, workers that have been focused throughout this... on airport at any given moment of time.

It fluctuates a little bit depending upon what projects, needing to be accomplished.

But they've been working 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

- We talked a lot about the runway and it's essentially complete now.

And that part of the project is ready to roll here, four or five days ahead of the first commercial flights return.

- Yes.

- What else is going on at the airport besides that?

- You know, the runway obviously is the one we all pay attention to.

And it's the most popular thing to talk about.

And and I get asked about a lot.

But we're also doing a revamp of our security screening checkpoints.

So that's the site that when you come to the airport, you go through the security process.

So you pull items out of your pocket and your laptop out of your bag.

Our existing site was really not designed for the next generation of TSA, or Transportation Security Administration, equipment.

So the board, our airport board, recognized that fact, felt like taking advantage of this closure to minimize the impact on the traveling public.

So we actually removed that section of the building, rebuilt it to the new standards, and it'll also be coming online.

- When a big regional airport like this is closed.

What happens to the flights that were normally would have been scheduled?

Are those airplanes diverted somewhere else?

Or are there just fewer flights for seventy-eight days?

- Well, in our case, there were a number of of airports around the area.

Bozeman, Idaho Falls, and of course, Rock Springs and a few other airports around the area that saw an increased level of flight schedule.

We know that's an impact, and it's difficult for people to want to travel further than they want to.

But the other airports in the area really stood up, extra effort.

And and we're grateful for their assistance to to manage the increased flight schedule.

- Every interview I've done this year includes the COVID questions.

One of the things that has impacted your project is a supply chain issue involving some glass, is that right?

- Yes.

You know, like all of us who have tried to do much of anything during COVID, we've even gone to the grocery store and seen shortages as you're keenly aware.

In our case, the final glazing or the store front glass that's going to be in front of the security checkpoint has been delayed.

And we had intended to use an alternative glass, at least for the temporary.

But we decided that really wasn't the best answer in the end.

So we'll not have quite the look that we had hoped for.

If that's the most significant issue that we deal with as we come down to to the final hours of reopening, We'll take that as a gift.

- You'’’ll live with it.

Thinking back to what airports went through in 2020 and 2021, some airports were closed for a while passenger traffic was just markedly lower than it had been in in 50 years.

Why not just do the rebuild then?

- Well, we so wish that the timing had, had been that, but the, this kind of project takes years and years of programming to put in the right place, and, and to have the FAA supply the funding in the right moment.

So we, here we are in 2022, and we're grateful for the FAA support.

We're grateful for the community's patience.

And this was the year it needed to get done and it it's gonna get done.

- Jim Elwood has built a long career in facilities management with many big projects to his credit.

But this one, he said stands out.

- And I can share with you, I've built a few capital projects over my career, and, and this one, the commitment by all involved is unrivaled to anything that I've experienced in the past.

- I thank you for sitting with us today.

It's been, it's just a very very interesting thing that's going on here.

And congratulations on pulling it off.

- Well, thank you.

I, I appreciate the chance to chat with you for a few minutes, Steve.

- Good luck and we'll be looking forward to a next trip to Jackson.

(upbeat music plays) - Funding for this program is made possible in part by the Wyoming Humanities Council helping Wyoming take a closer look at life through the humanities, thinkwy.org, and by the members of the Wyoming PBS Foundation.

Thank you for your support.