The largest ever capital project undertaken by Highlands and Islands Airports is progressing to programme with substantial elements of the extension to Sumburgh Airport’s main instrument runway now completed.

The major civil engineering project involves the extension of the 09/27 runway’s eastern and western ends into the sea through land reclamation and will open up opportunities to increase capacity on existing air services and develop new scheduled flights with larger types of aircraft.

The resurfacing of the extended runway is now nearing completion and the next stage of works will involve modifications to the existing airfield ground lighting and Instrument Landing System at the airport.

Work started on site in April 2005 and a total of almost 400,000 m³ of material has been required to build the runway extensions. Other than the 72,000 tonnes of heavy rock armour imported from Norway and placed last year to secure the land reclamations before winter set in, the majority of the material used has been extracted from the Wilsness Hill area of the airport.

The total cost of the project will be circa £10 million and the principal contractor is Balfour Beatty Civil Engineering Ltd (BBCEL). Design and project management services are being provided by Shetland Islands Council’s Capital Programme Service (SIC-CPS).

The target completion date for the extended runway becoming fully operational was set at 31 October 2006.

The runway extension is the key aim for the members of the Sumburgh Airport Strategic Partnership. The partnership comprises HIAL, Shetland Islands Council, Shetland Enterprise, and the Sumburgh Airport Consultative Committee.

The project is being funded by the SASP partners, the Scottish Executive and the European Regional Development Fund through the Highlands and Islands Special Transitional Programme 2000-2006.

Shetland experiences one of the most aggressive marine environments in the UK which presented three main challenges to the project team. Firstly, the structure had to be robust enough to survive the prolonged and sustained battering of the winter seas year on year. Secondly the structure had to be able to be built in a fairly short construction season with gales starting late September and going on to late March or early April every year. Thirdly, the solution had to remain affordable and represent value for money for the funding partners.

Sumburgh Airport manager Nigel Flaws said: “This major project continues to run to programme. The extended runway will support our route development work, which aims to deliver new air services for Shetland, and will enable existing scheduled services to operate without weight restrictions.”

Sumburgh Airport’s current scheduled services are operated by BA franchise partner Loganair to Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Inverness. Faroese airline Atlantic Airways will start operating a Faroes-Sumburgh-London Stansted service – the islands’ first direct link with London – in June this year.

Grant Dudgeon, HIAL’s infrastructure services manager said: “The whole project in terms of design, build and procurement is delivering excellent results to date and we are pleased to be developing a scheme that should serve as a model for best practice in the industry.

“An Early Contractor Involvement (ECI) procurement strategy was seen as the most effective way to meet the challenges of this project. The work on buildability, affordability and structural integrity which was carried out in the very early stages of this project is now paying dividends.”