INVESTIGATION IN SELECTING THE OPTIMUM AIRPORT RUNWAY ORIENTATION WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO EGYPTIAN AIRPORTS

Determination of a runway orientation is a critical task in the planning and design of an airport. Runways usually oriented in the direction of the prevailing winds. The best direction can be decided through proper execution of wind analysis for designated area. In this study, wind analysis is conducted by manual analysis and computer analysis to check the accuracy of used software in computer analysis by comparing their results with the manual procedure. The manual analysis represented by windrose type II while the computer analysis represented by two software FAA Airport design and Windrose PRO. In order to analyze the available local wind observations with windrose II manual procedure and FAA Airport design software they must be converted to suitable windrose statistics so that a third software should be used . In this study WRPLOT View software is used to do this task. In this study three case studies Aswan international airport, Al Nozha international airport and Marsa Alam international airport were studied. These cases studies subject to wind analysis by use of manual analysis and computer analysis. For FAA Airport Design and WindRose PRO software there were small differences between its results and windrose II manual analysis results. In order to verify the optimization process in each case study, a comparison was made between existing runways orientation and estimated optimum runways orientation. For Aswan international airport the existing runway which has actual orientation of 170.88/350.88 which provides 98.07% wind coverage while the optimum runway orientation is 174/354 which provides 98.2% wind coverage. For Al Nozha there are two existing runways which have actual orientation of 45.06/225.07 and 179.99/359.99 which provides 84.11% and 93.27% wind coverage respectively while the optimum runway orientation is one runway with orientation of 146/326 which provides 96.04% wind coverage. For Marsa Alam international airport the existing runway which has actual orientation of 149.75/329.76 which provides 99.65% wind coverage while the optimum runway orientation is 156/336 which provides 99.72% wind coverage. Parametric analysis applied on each case study in order to studying the effect of each controlling parameter on wind coverage. This analysis is proceed by use of FAA Airport Design software because it allow the designer to keep the other parameters fixed while changing one of them. These parameters are number of runways, runway orientation, maximum allowable crosswind component and maximum allowable tailwind component.