In a tightly scheduled, large-scale project, the 15/33 runway at Salzburg Airport was refurbished from 24 April to 28 May 2019. The concrete runway from the 1960s would remain as the foundation for the new covering layer consisting of 120,000 tons of asphalt.

Part of this giant project was the core drilling of more than 800 holes for the runway illumination as well as an impressive 10.8 km of floor cuts. In fact, three special construction companies worked simultaneously in order to finish the works on time: Possehl Spezialbau, ÖBA and OAT. With regards to diamond tools and on-site support, they referred to TYROLIT as their professional partner.

10.8 km of floor cuts and more than 800 core drills with no time to lose

Key of the renovation of „Salzburg’s longest straight road” (2,850 meters) was to maintain the current concrete runway as a base layer, and, thus, to avoid an extra 4,000 truck rides for its removal. With a beheading machine, the 45 m wide runway had to be divided into smaller concrete panels, which should act as a tension-free base layer. This required over 10.8 km of preparative floor cuts with a width of 15 mm and a depth of 300 mm, amounting to 240 cuts of 45 m each. With a time span of only 5 days, this was pretty challenging, yet feasible. The TYROLIT floor saw blades in TGD® Technology were just perfect for the task and smoothly managed the sometimes ingenious solutions the cutting professionals and TYROLIT application engineers came up with.

After the new layer of asphalt was finished, over 800 core drills for the state-of-the-art LED-illumination of the runway had to be done – again within only 5 days. For this challenge, the professional drillers used TYROLIT drill bits with TGD® Technology, which proofed to be just right for the material mix of concrete and asphalt. The drilling as well as the subsequent tasks were finished within the planned period, and so the airport was also reopened as scheduled.