With the rapid development of China’s civil aviation industry, the safety of aircraft takeoff and landing is an important consideration and challenge faced by the airport authorities. Friction, which is generated on the contact surface between the tire and runway, is a crucial factor in ensuring the safe landing of aircraft. Measuring the friction coefficient is a vital task for resolving the issue of measuring runway friction coefficient in China. In this paper, we present a finite element method to quantify the runway friction coefficient. We perform a multi-physical field coupling analysis of tire-runway interactions utilizing ABAQUS. This allows us to obtain the correlation between the friction coefficient and the tread friction (shear) stress under varying load, pressure, and speed conditions. By analyzing the trend of friction stress variation under both univariate and multivariate operating conditions, and subsequently employing the fitting method to reverse solve the friction coefficient, it is possible to establish models for estimating the friction coefficient under differing operating conditions. This leads us to the achievement of a measurement method that solely relies on tread friction stress to assess friction coefficient within specific operating conditions. Finally, a tester for determining the friction coefficient of airport runways has been employed to validate an estimation model in accordance with standard working conditions. Six experiments were conducted at a distance of 3 000 metres, as a result, the discrepancies between the estimation outcomes and the actual measurements ranged from 2.47% to 4.13%. This study affirms the validity and accuracy of the finite element method-based estimation model and presents a stimulating framework for investigating the measurement technique of runway friction coefficient.