Application of geomatic techniques to monitoring of the airport infrastructure

Modern geomatic techniques can provide useful methods to inquiry airport areas, not only runways and parking areas, but also surrounding areas including obstacles. It is essential to have an updated DTM (Digital Terrain Model) of the entire airport area for viewing and creating a land registry of aeronautical obstacles in order to proceed to the design of flight plans. By means of georeferenced stereo pairs of high resolution satellite images it is possible to build DTM on wide areas. For high traffic load airports, runways, taxiways and aprons maintenance is a critical task. A Pavement Management System requires periodic monitoring activities to control structural and geometrical characteristics, with the aim of ensuring the infrastructure functionality. Surface regularity, runway slope, plates planarity and reciprocal asset, are among the most relevant parameters, on which has been investigated in this note. A very high level of accuracy is required and it has been shown that the TLS (Terrestrial Laser Scanner) is a very precise and efficient tool. The note summarizes the results of the processing of both high resolution satellite images (acquired on Trinidad and Tobago airport area) and of data acquired by TLS on the pavement of an international airport. Four Pleiades stereo pairs, with 0.5 m spatial resolution, have been georeferenced by GPS and processed to produce a grid DEM (1 m step) Scans obtained by TLS on a runway segment have been co-registered and georeferenced.From the point clouds, a very dense DTM has been obtained, which allowed the extraction of longitudinal and transversal profiles. The linear fit of the profiles produces the gradients, which were compared with the required standards. On the same airport, a concrete apron was surveyed by TLS. Surveys allowed checking plates deformation and their reciprocal asset.