building type notes
Airport Terminal and Aviation Facility Roofing in Columbia, SC
An airport never closes, and that single fact reshapes everything about roofing one. There is no after-hours, no weekend shutdown, no quiet week to tear off and rebuild a roof. Every access point, material lift, and crew movement has to clear the airport's facilities department and its FAA Part 139 safety program, and on the secure side of the fence, TSA protocols too. We build that coordination into the scope before the contract is signed, because discovering it after mobilization is how aviation projects stall.
Terminal Roofs Are Big, Flat, and Drainage-Critical
Terminal roofs cover long, low-slope expanses with very little pitch, which makes drainage design the whole ballgame and ponding tolerance close to zero. Standing water on a roof that large finds every weak seam and accelerates membrane aging in our humid heat. Most terminal re-roofing in Columbia goes to a TPO or PVC single-ply over a tapered insulation system engineered to pull water to the drains and correct the dead-flat areas that pond. The HVAC load on a terminal is also far heavier and denser than a comparable commercial building, so the roof carries more curbed penetrations and more flashing touchpoints, each detailed individually rather than with a stock pattern.
Jet Blast and Wind Exposure on Airside Roofs
Roofs near active aprons and taxiways live in a wind environment that exceeds anything a typical logistics building sees. Jet blast and the open exposure of an airfield put uplift and scour on the membrane that demand adhesion and ballast specifications above the standard, along with edge metal and perimeter securement engineered for the loads. Columbia also sits in a region that takes thunderstorm wind and the remnants of tropical systems moving up from the coast, so wind design is not a formality on these buildings. We spec attachment and edge detailing to the airside conditions, not to a generic wind zone.
Hangars and General Aviation Structures
High-bay hangars are their own animal. A clear-span hangar roof, whether wide-flange steel or a pre-engineered metal building, generates large uplift loads across an open frame and needs fastening patterns and seam geometry built for it. For new high-bay aviation structures and hangars, standing seam metal is frequently the right call, while terminal and support buildings lean single-ply. The selection follows the existing deck, the load capacity, and the operational constraints, and we develop it after walking the roof with the facility's engineer rather than before. FBO and private-hangar work carries lighter security than the terminal but often a more demanding building.
