By Alexandre Raposo

2.  The Airport’s runway expansion is one of the largest
and most complex civil engineering works
performed in Europe in the last decades.
 The Madeira island Airport is located on the South
border of the island in a place named “Santa
Catarina”.
 The need to increase the existent runway and the
lack of suitable plane lands in the island, led to the
decision of constructing a large prestressed concrete
structure, that extends the runway from about 1800
m to a total length of 2781 m.

3.  The structure for extension of the Madeira island
airport is a bridge of unusual proportions that had to
be designed to withstand the loads of large
commercial airplanes.
 This new runway extension was built over the ocean.
Instead of using landfill to construct the extension,
the runway sits on 180 columns.

4.  The adopted structural design consisted in a series
of frames aligned perpendicularly to the runway
axis, with 32 meter long spans between them, and
which support a bi-directional prestressed concrete
slab with variable thickness.

5.  The direct foundations have an octagonal shape and
a deployment area of nearly 100 m2.
 The reinforced concrete indirect foundations are
connected by octagonal blocks supported by groups
of 8 moulded piles with a 1.5m diameter and lengths
which can reach as much as 62m.
 The runway is located at a height of 58 m above the
sea level.

6.  After it was completed, the Madeira Runway
extension won the Outstanding Structures Award by
the International Association of Bridge and
Structural Engineering.

7.  The new runway is widely celebrated as a great
feat in architecture due to its sheer size and the
amount of labor it took to erect it.
 The total construction costs for the extension
amounted to more than 500 million Euros, a
small price to pay considering pilots and
passengers can now land without fear.

8.  The new airport runway can accommodate all
kinds of commercial and private aircraft and
more than three million passengers per year.

9. Alexandre Raposo