Building Type
Airport Terminal & Aviation Facility Roofing with scope notes, photos, and next steps.
An airport never closes, so a roof project on one cannot run like a normal commercial job. Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport moves tens of millions of passengers a year across four terminals as a major hub for Spirit and JetBlue and a heavy Southwest operation, and it has stayed under near-constant terminal expansion and improvement. Every access point, every material lift, every crew deployment on a property like that has to be coordinated with airport facilities, the FAA Part 139 safety program, and in places TSA security. We build that coordination into the scope before a contract is signed, not after a crew shows up at a gate they cannot get through. Add the cargo, FBO, and rental-car infrastructure clustered around FLL, plus the reliever traffic across Broward, and South Florida's aviation market generates steady demand for roofs that can take both a working airfield and a hurricane.
Terminal and airside roofs face exposures a comparable logistics building never sees. Airside membranes have to handle jet blast, which means adhesion and ballast specifications well beyond standard commercial. Sitting a few miles off the Atlantic, these roofs also take the full force of South Florida's wind, so attachment design has to meet Broward's hurricane code with no compromise. The HVAC on a terminal is denser and heavier than typical commercial, producing more curbed penetrations and more flashing touchpoints to maintain. And terminal roofs are vast, flat, low-slope expanses where ponding tolerance is effectively zero, which makes drainage design the part of the job we will not shortcut. On large terminal re-roofs we generally specify TPO or PVC single-ply over a tapered insulation system that builds in slope and clears standing water.
The buildings around the terminal, cargo facilities, the rental-car center, FBO hangars, aircraft maintenance shops, and airport-campus hotels, each bring their own challenges, but the airport-coordination requirement never goes away. Badging and security access apply at every part of an airport campus, and our crews treat that as a baseline, planned for in advance rather than discovered on site. High-bay hangars are a building type of their own: large clear-span structures, often pre-engineered metal, where wind uplift and seam geometry drive the roof specification. For new high-bay aviation buildings and hangars, standing-seam metal is frequently the right call, and we spec and install those systems across the Fort Lauderdale market.
We work with the airport facilities department and the Part 139 coordinator to develop a phased work plan that airport operations approves. Material deliveries, crane lifts, and any work near airside areas are scheduled in approved windows and coordinated with the FAA NOTAM process where required. Our preconstruction survey documents every penetration, curb height, and mechanical clearance before we build the work plan, and oversized equipment curbs and complex through-penetrations get individually engineered flashing rather than a stock detail. We do not mobilize crew to airside work without confirmed authorization, and the badging and credentialing timeline is factored into the bid rather than treated as a favor.
A terminal roof sits over ticketing halls, security checkpoints, baggage systems, concessions, and gate areas that hold thousands of people at any hour, and a single leak in the wrong place can shut down a checkpoint lane or a baggage carousel and ripple into flight delays. That raises the stakes on daily dry-in well past what a normal commercial job demands. We phase the work in modest sections, keep each section watertight at the end of every shift, and protect the interior below with the assumption that we cannot relocate the people underneath us. On the broad low-slope terminal decks, drainage is the difference between a roof that lasts and one that ponds, so we build slope with tapered insulation, lay out primary drains and overflow scuppers to the actual roof areas, and clear standing water that would otherwise sit as dead load on a long flat span through every storm season.