Brackett Field Airport is a public airport located near La Verne, in Los Angeles County. About an hour east of the studios in Hollywood, it has been used for filming scenes for several TV series and movies. The 276-acre general aviation airport provides a restaurant, flight schools, and numerous aviation related businesses. Owned and operated by the County of Los Angeles, Brackett Field facilitates more than 114,000 general aviation takeoffs and landings each year and is publicly available to general aviation aircraft.
The airport plays a vital role in the nation’s integrated system of airports, is an asset to the local communities, and as any airport, it needs maintenance, repair, and upgrades to keep it operating safely and efficiently. Putting to use Federal Airport Improvement Program and State grants for capital improvement projects at the airport, the County of Los Angeles initiated request for proposals to provide a pavement condition assessment and engineering review. G3 Quality, Inc. (G3) was selected to perform field exploratory condition evaluation along the runway, field studies and laboratory testing and analysis of the accumulated data and information at the site. The purpose of this evaluation was to provide the pavement and subgrade soil strength comparisons between the threshold crossing height (TCH) zone and the runway area beyond the TCH near the touchdown zone. G3’s scope of services consisted of project set-up; surface condition observations; Falling Weight Deflectometer (FWD) testing; pavement coring and pavement structural section sampling; laboratory testing; and analysis and recommendations report.
Based on information obtained from the client, the field work and laboratory testing and analysis we performed, and our experience with similar projects, G3 developed conclusions addressing the observed pavement conditions. These observations will be reviewed by FAA and serve to support necessary renovations to the existing runway, and potentially an extension of the runway to support growing operations.
