Airfield pavement: mid-way through the rational-design “revolution”

International audienceThe design of airfield pavements has undergone a silent yet major revolution over the last two decades. Following what had started in the road transportation sector back in the 1970s, airport infrastructure stakeholders have been gradually switching from semi-empirical approaches, such as the CBR (Californian Bearing Ratio) or the PCA (Portland Cement Association) methods, to newer "rational" procedures based on mechanistic models and numerical computations