Airports

Paving of airport runways, taxiways, and aprons has provided a strong market for concrete in recent years, as commercial and military airports upgrade their ground facilities to keep up with increasing air traffic.

In 1992, 25 million flights took off or landed at the nation's 100 largest airports. The first United States airport runway was built in 1928 in Dearborn, Michigan, by the Ford Motor Company for a Ford-manufactured plane called the Silver Goose.

This and other early runways used variable pavement thicknesses similar to those of early highways: concrete that was eight or nine inches deep at the edges and six or seven inches thick at the center.