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16/06/2022

PCN Vs PCI in your Airport

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Why do you need to measure both PCN and PCI at your

airport?
Airport pavements play a key role in the safety of passengers and aircraft during ground
maneuvers, such as taxi, take off and landing, it must provide the required support, the
necessary friction and stay in a proper maintenance condition not to generate any
possible foreign object debris (FOD) potentially danger for the airplane and dangerous
situations for the people it carries . Even a small inconvenient can generate a
considerable operative issue to the flight and the airport, generating a consistent money
loss or safety risk. For this reason, it is important to maintain the pavement in good
condition and carry out a constant monitoring of all pavement characteristics, such as
bearing capacity, friction, roughness, visual survey, etc.

Importance of the ACN/PCN parameter

The first thing you should make sure of, is that the runway has the proper structure to
support to the load of the various types of aircrafts that operate over the pavement. The
International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) prescribes as requirement the verification
of the parameter relationship of parameters Aircraft Classification Number (ACN) and
Pavement Classification Number (PCN). The first one represents the requested
pavement strength, from a usually 20 years traffic, and second one represents the
available pavement strength. If the PCN is larger than the ACN it can be concluded that
from a structural point of view, the pavement can support the expected traffic. However, if
the ACN value is above the PCN value, this could mean that pavement structure does
not have enough strength to support the traffic for the expected time and therefore the
service life will be shorter. And it is important to keep track of these values ​in order to
have control of pavement decreasing. In many cases, you should look critically at your
runway and make the necessary adjustments.

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For this reason, it is a good idea to know the structural condition more accurately, which
can be measured with a Heavy Weight Deflectometer (HWD). The HWD performs a non-
destructive test and with the right software, one can assign the ACN from external
database and calculate the PCN value directly from the measured data, providing a fast
comparison.

Why use the PCI in combination with PCN

PCI and PCN together play an important role in finding the most critical pavement
section inside the airport network infrastructure. The Pavement condition index (PCI) is a
rating index for pavement condition based on visual examination of the surface pavement
conditions and is a method for reporting the pavement condition. It is a standardized
method to identify cracks and severity. Section characterized by low value of PCI can be
related to poor pavement structural condition, where maybe PCN could be lower than
ACN. The PCI value can be obtained by a Laser Crack Measurement System (LCMS)
crack detection, that allows a fast and objective calculation of the PCI.
PCI is in general used to evaluate the condition of the surface. The results of multiple
yearly investigation can be inserted inside an Airport Pavement Management System
(APMS) to evaluate the decreasing performance or the pavement and determine the best
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moment in which maintenance needs to be applied to restore a 100 PCI value.

As mentioned above, it is important to measure both PCN About and PCI, Contact
as PCN has its
limitations in that it is only intended as a method for airport operators to evaluate
acceptable operations of aircraft, but it has not porpoise to support pavement design or
maintenance. To ensure a safe airplane operation, it is important that the infrastructures
pavements are both strong enough and functional enough to receive this precious cargo.

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