Rensselaer Adventures

This blog reports events and interesting tidbits from Rensselaer, Indiana and the surrounding area.

Friday, October 30, 2009

Finishing the runway

A week ago, on October 22, I passed by the airport to see what they were doing. There were two guys out on the north end of the runway who seemed to be injecting something into the seams of the concrete. (The other one was with a different truck and is not in this picture.)
At the south end a machine was doing something to the runway that was raising a big cloud of dust. If you look closely, you can see a vehicle in the middle of the dust.
A another visit yesterday (Oc 29), a week later, showed that the end of construction was very near. Two workers were picking up one of the porta-potties and putting it next to the road. They were in the parking lot at the corner of the SR 114 and Airport Road, which had been covered in crushed stone. The crushed stone had been removed, and it looks like this parking lot was a temporary lot only meant for use with the construction.
I talked to one of the workers, and he said that workers would be around for a few days to do some finishing work, but that the runway should be open this morning (Friday). The last big job on the runway was painting. Further down the runway a paint truck was taking on supplies. As long as it does not rain today, they should get the job done.
In the past week the landing lights have been installed.

The worker I talked to thought that they would remove the big Xs at the ends of the runway after dusk Thursday. The runway would then be open Friday morning. He thought there might be a lot of traffic early as people fly in to try out the new runway. We will see.

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