Maybe it all has something to do with the fact that the runways at Jax are old as fuck and need some work anyway. I have landed and bounced a 250K E-6 there many times and the pavement somehow survived. I even did a RON there, fueling up to around 300K and we somehow didn't sink into the pavement. The 737 is NOT a heavy airplane at all, those runways are long overdue for some work.
Totally agree; the runways at Jax have needed to be redone for a long time. The issue is we have one usable runway, when you shut it down to work on the runway, you've effectively shutdown the entire East Coast VP fleet.
Fortunately we can use Cecil as "det space" for the 13 months it will take to replace the runway and rewire the new runway.
The introduction of the P-8 is what brought about the engineering studies that determined the runways need to be redone.
The original plan was to just resurface the runways and displace the VP folksf for about 8 weeks. Then the engineers did some concrete load bearing tests and make the determination the runways were beyond saving. The engineers predicted a 2014-2015 "catastrophic failure" of the runway at Jax if nothing is done.
Like I said, it's not a just one aircraft landing that's the problem, it's increasing the weight of all the tenant command aircraft that is hastening this project.
