Photo by: Bloomberg
The refurbished and upgraded Manuel Quarta Punza Airport, in the Uíge province, Angola, has officially opened, global engineering and technical services company Aurecon said on Wednesday.
The Empresa Nacional de Exploração de Aeroportos e Navegação Aérea (the National Enterprise for the Operations of Airports and Air Traffic Control) initiated the project in 2009 to expand the airport’s capacity.
The Uíge airport, which, according to reports, was renamed in 2013 to honour the historic achievements of freedom fighter and one of the first governors of the province Manuel Quarta Punza, who died in 2007, could now cater for aircraft as large as a Boeing 737-700.
In May, Angola President José Eduardo dos Santos inaugurated the revamped airport that now boasted a 4 600 m2 terminal facility and a fully rehabilitated navigation tower with modern equipment.
The main runway extended 2 300 m in length and 30 m in width, with 7.5-m-wide paved shoulders and 115 m by 18 m and 190 m by 18 m taxiways.
Aurecon was responsible for the construction supervision and project management of the rehabilitation and upgrading of the existing airside pavements and a new stormwater drainage system.
The company constructed starter extensions at both thresholds of the runway to increase the available take-off run after the local government experienced difficulty resettling an informal housing settlement that had hampered the designed extension of the runway, said Aurecon country manager for Angola Tony Barreto Dos Santos.
The starter extension method provided an area before a runway threshold for the initial ground roll of an aircraft. Sections of the runway strip were used for construction of the starter extensions.