Aurecon

About Bruce

Bruce Morton is Aurecon’s Leader for Airports, specialising in airports and pavement engineering.

His particular areas of experience include airport design, pavement design, reconstruction, rehabilitation and maintenance, airport pavements, recycling of materials, specialised materials testing, accelerated pavement testing and specialist auditing.

Your most challenging project? Why?

Reconstruction of Waterkloof Air Force Base. The project is technically challenging and multi-disciplinary, requiring innovative solutions to mitigate sinkhole formation under the runways and taxiways.

The design and construction was fast-tracked to ensure that the main runway was operational within a 14 month period at a cost of US$122 million. A major challenge was ensuring that the client (National Government) and the infrastructure end user (Air Force), who had diversely different goal and objectives for the project, were kept satisfied.

Where do you see airports over the next five years?

We expect to see steady growth in the developed airport market with high expected growth in developing airport market.

The US and European countries have been the dominant markets in the aviation industry and act as catalysts for the overall industry growth. Developing nations such as China, India, Mexico, and Brazil are expected to emerge as potential marketplaces for aerospace products in the short term.

The Asia Pacific region currently has 36% of the backlog of large commercial aircraft and is rapidly becoming the largest market for new aircraft orders, and this will be accompanied with significant growth in airport infrastructure.

In addition, China is expected to have 3 700 large-bodied aircraft by the end of 2028, which will require some significant investments in airport operations and facilities in the next five to ten years as these orders are progressively delivered.

One of the great challenges facing the airports is...

Meeting the increasing demands for environmentally-efficient infrastructure provision. Transport, particularly air transport, is increasingly under pressure to decrease carbon emissions and this extends not only to aircraft, but also the airport infrastructure.

There is pressure to improve the efficiency of current terminal buildings and incorporate green building concepts into their existing and new facilities. Similarly on the aprons, taxiways and runways there is a need to provide more innovative solutions which maximise performance.