Downer NZ

CATEGORY 3: Projects with a value between $10 million and $50 million

Perfect landing

The Queenstown Airport Runway 05-23 Widening and Overlay project was essential for enabling evening flights and increasing visitor access to the country’s most famous resort town. In October 2015, Downer was awarded a six month, $15.7 million contract to upgrade the Queenstown Airport main runway in preparation for evening flights, starting May 2016. The contract was challenging logistically, required collaborative working with many parties, and had extremely high quality requirements and a demanding programme. Downer completed this runway improvement package in a collaborative working CATEGORY environment, under budget and to 3 FINALIST programme. “The team delivered the works to a stringent pre-winter deadline – as the airport and airlines had committed to the arrival of evening flights in time for the 2016 ski season,” says the company. “Probably the greatest risk to the project was the short contract period, with a fixed completion date required to allow evening flights to begin. This required a peak spend on site of over $4 million in one month, and an average of almost $3 million.

“Due to delays in contract award (due to the need to get the project under budget) this contract had a very short window considering the amount of equipment and materials which needed to be established before work could get underway.”

The majority of the work had to be completed airside at night, and the project returned to the airport each morning in a faultless condition, as a basic requirement was no disruption to existing commercial flights.

“We overcame several logistics issues with the short contract window including purchase, transport and assembly on-site of a new asphalt plant from Germany; supply of a pugmill from Australia; and production of aggregates and transport through to site.”

At the finish of the project the client, Queenstown Airport said: “From a client’s perspective, we are delighted to see the project completed on time, on budget and to a consistent high degree of quality.

“The project has been a pleasure to be involved in from start to finish and in general, this has been the feedback and feeling from our staff and stakeholders.” l