From the Flight Deck

Paving of Marshfield Municipal Airport’s main ramp began earlier this week, and what a difference a day makes!

The binder lift – the first two inches of shiny, black paving – should be done by Thursday. And then contractor Lawrence Lynch Corp. will adjust the drainage structure prior to a finish coat.

“The frames and grates are covered right now,” Nick Prescott said Tuesday. Nick is the resident project representative with Airport Solutions Group, the airport’s consulting firm who designed the project.

“They’ll go back, cut the asphalt, and lift up the grates so water can get into the structures. Once that’s done, they’ll pave their next lift of surface course asphalt, and that will be done – no more paving after that.”

Hot asphalt is loaded into the paver.

The first lift is applied to the second, finish section of support material. 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.

“Next week they’ll work on tie downs, and the electricians will come back to do their electrical outlets and pulling wire for those,” Nick said. “And then some loam and seed, and cleanup. That puts us out about two weeks; then we’ll do the punch list the following.”

The main ramp is the paved area between the administration building/terminal and the maintenance and jet hangars and bordering Taxiway Alpha, which parallels the runway. The completion target date still looks good for Oct. 24.

New wetlands reconstruction plants set a couple of weeks ago are coming in. “The big storm last Thursday helped,” Nick said. “So far, so good.”

Rollers compact the newly poured 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.

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.