AWH - if you are in pavement business, Yoder is a great textbook to buy and keep for decades. I suggest working through the examples in the first couple of chapters (and the single and two layer examples, but not the three layer), as a precursor to the runway design stuff.
The ICAO 9157 must unfortunately only be available as hardcopy (written in the pre-computer days), but can be purchased from the ICAO shop. I got excited when I checked my library and thought I found an electronic copy, but it was only a couple of pages of it that I had scanned earlier.
A link to a paper discussing the background to the new alpha factors is here:
http://profemery.info/alpha.pdf
Sir George - the FWD (and its big brother HWD) are indeed a useful way of collecting data to evaluate the pavement strength. They introduce a whole new layer of complexity in analysis though and produce mind-boggling amounts of data with no clear or immediate answer. One way of accessing and using the data simply is to apply benchmarks, which can be done by any airport engineer with a simple spreadsheet. There is a paper here which discusses this and shows the pretty pictures in Figures 3 and 4:
http://profemery.info/papers/Airport...n_AMS_2009.pdf
Cheers
OverRun