Runway (Overview)

The figure below shows the main AIXM 5 classes used for the runway and runway direction concept.

A Runway is situated at maximum one AirportHeliport.

The runway is a defined rectangular area on a land aerodrome/heliport prepared for the landing and take-off from aircraft.

An airport may have an arbitrary number of physical runways associated with it, each of which has -in general- up to two runway directions defined (It is possible to record less or more than two RWY directions if required).

The Runway at an airport will be identified by a designator, normally composed of the designators of its runway directions. A runway has a nominalLength and a nominalWidth.

The Runway has a surface that can be described by the attributes of the SurfaceChracteristics class. This includes inter alia the type of the predominant material of which a surface of the movement area is composed, e.g. Asphalt or Grass, etc. and certain methods for classifying the strength of the surface such as the PCN (Pavement Classification Number).

The RunwayDirection is one of the two landing and take-off directions of a Runway. It is defined by a RunwayDirection.designator. Each runway direction will have a defined trueBearing and may also have a defined magneticBearing.

The RunwayCentrelinePoint is an operationally significant position on the centre line of a runway direction. A typical example of the role of a runway centre line point is the runway threshold or the end of the runway. The location of a runway centre line point is defined by the Point class.

The RunwayDeclaredDistance is a conventional operational distance declared for a runway direction. The type of declared distance may be a Take-off Run Available ('TORA'), Take-off Distance Available ('TODA'), Landing Distance Available ('LDA'), etc.  It is measured from a certain RunwayCentreLinePoint.