From the Flight Deck

Three months and three weeks in, we can now see around the dusty, dirty corner of the main ramp portion of the reconstruction project ongoing at Marshfield Municipal Airport. And the other side looks shiny and bright.

“With the amount of rain in the forecast we’re focusing on fine grading and prepping the P-209 material for pavement,” Nick Prescott said Tuesday. Nick is the resident project representative with Airport Solutions Group, the airport’s consulting firm who designed the project.

The hope, Nick says, is that then early next week contractor Lawrence Lynch Corp. can start paving the first layer of asphalt.

“And if we can get a jump on that early in the week, maybe we can finish with our second lift, our surface course of asphalt. If all goes according to plan next week, they should be able to pave everything.”

As with the finish layer of asphalt on the airport’s small east ramp, completed a few weeks ago, the main ramp’s finish layer will make the airport look like new.

P-209 material will soon fill this section of the ramp.

P-209 is a crushed aggregate course designed to go over a surface of P-154, the sub-base material that provides a strong, stable base typical in airports. The P-154 fills 22 inches of the 32-inch box that Lynch removed. A layer of P-209 goes over it and is thoroughly compacted, creating the base for the asphalt.

The ramp reconstruction project is part of the Land Use with Higher Potential Pollutant Loads (LUHPPL) initiative, a conditional order to the earlier runway program. It is a complete reconstruction and improvement of the main ramp area, and it is essential to ensure continued operational safety and environmental compliance, bringing the airport to current FAA standards.

This project concludes the airport-wide safety improvement project, which has seen various stages since planning began in 2002. The first phase of the safety improvement project saw the construction of a longer and wider (3,900 x 100 feet, from 3,000 x 75) runway in 2014, which allows aircraft to take off and land more safely.

An island is being graded between the jet hangar ramp area and Taxiway Alpha.

Enhancing airport safety is a high priority for the Marshfield Airport Commission and Shoreline Aviation, which manages the airport for the town, as well as the FAA and MassDOT’s Aeronautics Division. Those agencies fund and administer a grant, respectively, financing most of the project.

Once the paving is done, “we’ll see about tie downs,” Nick said. “We’re still forecasting October 24th to finish. With the rain coming in this week, I don’t know if that will impact what they do with the P-209, but we’ll have to see. It’s a small storm.”

Ramp grading and compacting continue at KGHG.