As we reported last fall, Congress passed and the President signed a five-year reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Act, which earmarks $96.7 billion in funding for aviation programs. That five-year window of certainty should unleash some major airport improvements at large and small facilities throughout the country.
The icing on the cake came last week when we received the 717-page Approved Advisory Circular Specifications for 2019 from FAA. This is the new mandatory specification that we’ve been working toward with FAA for the past three years. The previous spec, which had not been updated for many years, had no mention of precast concrete. Cast-in-place was the preferred method, which meant that a precaster would often need to jump through hoops to persuade the local airport authority to convert a job to precast.
Rich Krolewski, our director of certification and regulatory services, initially met in Washington, D.C., with John Dermody, FAA director of Airport Safety and Standards and described the advantages of updating FAA specifications to align with ASTM standards. After receiving approvals from Dermody, Rich met repeatedly over three years with Greg Cline, FAA’s senior pavement engineer, to create the language in the document. The result is that we converted an outdated coarse aggregate specification that favored cast-in-place concrete to precast-specific language that opens the door across the country for precast concrete drainage structures on FAA projects.
In addition, we were able to add a QA-QC component that specifically requires the NPCA Plant Certification Program (or an equivalent) as a mandatory requirement. We are the only certification program specifically mentioned in the circular. The FAA Advisory Circular covers 19,000-plus airport authorities, including hundreds of major hub airports. It is likely to create a domino effect through the Department of Defense, which references the FAA spec, and other federal agencies. This is a big deal – a big win for NPCA and the precast concrete industry and the result of a lot of hard work and constant follow-up. When we tell NPCA members we’re “working for you,” this is exactly what we mean!
Ty Gable
President, National Precast Concrete Association
This is huge for Precast Concrete and a direct result of leadership recognizing our true mission as an association: “The promotion, protection and advancement of precast concrete”
All other activities should be secondary to this mission statement! The work that Rich Krolewski has done in creating relationships across the country is second to none. Like it or not, the first step starts with a relationship that allows you to get in the door, the fact that Precast Concrete is the superior choice can only be asserted once in front of the specifier.
President Gable has wisely facilitated the means by which Krolewski is able to access every DOT, municipality and Federal Regulator. The chicken or the egg? No matter, these activities bolster and insure our associations education and certification program.
Great work and gratitude to Gable and Krolewski!
By adding a plant certification requirement you excluded all the smaller precasters that can’t justify the expense of maintaining certification.
Thank you for your comment, Dave. While we certainly appreciate your decision to forego plant certification due to the expense, the QA/QC component is critical to the specification in the view of the FAA. Growing numbers of DOTs and specifiers at all levels of publicly funded projects are demanding higher levels of quality assurance from their contractors. In a highly competitive construction environment, we need to provide them with that assurance. If we don’t, they will select other materials that provide them with the assurance they need. We believe that certification programs throughout the industry have improved overall quality and safety at the plants and have raised the profile of the precast concrete industry to the level where agencies such as the FAA are open to writing precast concrete into their specifications.