Asphalt concrete pavements on commercial airports in the United States are constructed according to the Federal Aviation Administration Advisory Circular (AC) 150/5370-10G, Part 5 – Flexible Surface Courses, Item P-401 Hot Mix Asphalt (HMA) Pavements.  The most recent version of Item P-401 includes an optional mixture design procedure based on the Superpave gyratory compactor.  Selection of the design mix by this optional method is based solely on volumetric properties of the asphalt concrete.  In this study, four laboratory performance tests were investigated for their ability to detect whether mixtures designed by this new method may be prone to rutting.  These tests included repeated load, static creep, indirect tensile strength, and asphalt pavement analyzer tests.  The objective was to evaluate acceptance criteria for the laboratory tests for asphalt mixtures prepared using unmodified and polymer-modified binders.  Six aggregate combinations, each with six different binders, comprised the mixtures studied here.  The binders included two different base performance grades, each with two levels of modification.  Based on the results, the asphalt pavement analyzer test is recommended as a rutting performance test for airport hot-mix asphalt mixture design.  The test was selected for recommendation based on its ability to differentiate between and rank mixture performance measures and to identify significant improvement when polymer-modified binders are used in the design mix.