Gary Mitchell, ACPA’s Vice President of Airports and Technology reports:

• Accredited training program: ACPA will work with the Air Force Institute of Technology to jointly develop a training course for airfield paving. ACPA will review the Current CE 555 syllabus and presentations to assess and provide input to the appropriateness of the existing course as an accredited training program. Ultimately, this jointly developed training program would replace the ACI Transportation inspector and flatwork finisher requirement is the UFGS concrete spec.
• Aggregate Gradation Specification: Tri-Service recognizes the difficulties of specific ASTM gradation requirements. To address the issues, ACPA and FAA have developed specification requirement whereby only the top size aggregate is specified and a combined gradation table is developed by the contractor to meet the coarseness and workability factor during the mix design phase as outlined in Air Force Engineering Technical Letter 97-5. Once the final P-501 specification is developed, the Tri-Service will consider adopting similar language for military airfields. There may be some adjustments required given the nature of military aircraft requirements. However, the Tri-services has agreed to work with ACPA to develop reasonable requirements and eliminate specifying ASTM #4 and #67 stone specifically.
• Contractor Central Batch Plant Certification: Tri-Service has agreed that the ACPA check list is appropriate for contractor batch plant certification. ACPA will continue to develop web-based forms for use and then the tri-services will include the ACPA check list as an option to the NRMCA checklist when a contractor plant is used. ACPA still needs to develop what requirement are needed for an engineer to be certified to use the check list and certify the plant. Third party certification is likely to be one requirement; however, Tri-Service has agreed to continue working with ACPA to develop this as a specification option.
• Contractor Quality Control Manager Requirements: Tri-Service recognizes some contractor QC personnel have many years of experience and may be better qualified than some inexperienced professional engineers. A resume that shows adequate experience in lieu of the professional engineers licenses will be included in future releases of the airfield concrete specification.
• Smoothness:  Tri-Service recognizes the California profilograph is old technology and that contractors has problems finding equipment and certified operators. They agree we need to have a new specification requirement. The FAA is currently working on a new criteria and has language in the draft specification developed with the ACPA to allow other types of profilers to collect data and use a rolling straightedge requirement of some kind. The Tri-services will most likely adopt whatever criteria the ACPA and FAA ultimately develops for use in 5370-10H as the requirement in subsequent released of the UFGS concrete specification.