Single runway airports – shut down? Several in Nigeria – Kaduna Airport and Maiduguri Airport for unknown periods. Chapel Hill in USA for 21 days. Aspen USA for 2 months. Broome in Australia for 11 days. Pune, India for 2 weeks. Bloemfontein, South Africa for two weekends (2 runways, so the main runway was closed for 2 months and this total closure was just for the intersection). Google News showed 8790 news items on ‘airport closure works’ for the last 10 years, so a guess of 100-200 might be reasonable.
There are some single runway airports which are very long, and works can shut one end and operations safely continue at the other. Walvis Bay in Namibia, and Auckland in New Zealand are examples.
Mostly, airports have more than one runway, and can then close one runway (although even that takes considerable organisation and planning). It is a popular option in Australia, with Perth and Melbourne doing that recently. Dubai did that a couple of years ago.
Mad_jock has the right idea though. I’ve got something like the 'fair fortnight' coming up soon – and everyone from every maintenance department is going to share in the shutdown. I only wish I had heard his advice earlier about allowing
2 weeks jobs done. 1 week for cockups and inspections rectification lighting etc.
Got the 2 weeks bit right on another airport. Forgot to allow for the 1 week bit. Things were a bit hectic towards the end of the closure.
