Monster Garage has monstrous capabilities

  • Published
  • By Taylor Lawrence
  • 377th Air Base Wing Public Affairs
KIRTLAND AFB, N.M. --  "Monster Garage" may be the facility's name, but you won't find Godzilla or Frankenstein anywhere on the premises. How it got its name seems to be lost to the dustbins of history, but visitors will find monster-sized flight crew training aids.

In Hangar 482 on the base's west side, what houses the garage was built during World War II to house B-24 "Liberator" bombers.

Using the Frankenstein monster reference, one who was made of discarded parts, Lt. Col. Kenneth McAdams, the 58th Training Squadron commander, describes its activity.

"We take broken, unwanted things, and turn them into useful, cost-effective and functional training aids."

The garage houses locally produced aircrew training modules primarily used to train 58th Special Operations Wing students on the duties they will perform for the Air Force.

With a seven-member crew of technicians, whose scrounging ability would rival any reality television show, these junkyard entrepreneurs "have an amazing capacity to locate useful components hidden in piles of refuse," said Anthony Tapia, Monster Garage technician. "Eighty-five percent of what we obtain is no cost, or purchased for $1."

Working their regular circuit of Defense Reutilization and Marketing Office yards to salvage useful items, and with connections to all the right recyclers, components seem to present themselves for useful new lives.

Recently, the technician team acquired a UH-1 "Huey" helicopter from a storage lot on Camp Pendleton, long forgotten on the sprawling Marine Corps Base in California. Purchased for a dollar, "this fuselage will provide a hands-on training aid for our students, one we didn't have, and improves our training methods," said McAdams.

Through the efforts of the Monster Garage technicians, the hangar contains a C-130 Hercules, CV-22 Osprey and HH-60 Pave-Hawk airframes for student instruction.

"It's better for us to train them here on our equipment than tying up a flyable multimillion-dollar piece of equipment for ground training," said McAdams. "If they make a mistake here, it's not as big a deal, when compared to making mistakes on the real equipment."

Aside from avoiding costly mistakes to serviceable aircraft, using the equipment at the Monster Garage costs much less than tying up a flight-capable aircraft needed for other student training, which for the CV-22 is $23,000 per flight hour.

"One of our training requirements is for students to perform an emergency egress from the CV-22 cockpit window. Resetting the emergency egress window commercially can cost tens of thousands of dollars, but using the Monster Garage simulator, we can repeat this exercise at no cost," said McAdams.

The work never stops for these creative technicians. Currently, they are converting an MC-130 Combat Talon I into a completely accurate model of a Combat Talon II. Once done, the Talon II will fill a training gap and free up training currently conducted on the ramp. If the conversion were done commercially, it would cost more than $10 million, but the Monster Garage technicians are getting the job done for $210,000.

"There are only three fabrication centers like this in the Air Force, and ours is the smallest. We save the Air Force a lot of money," McAdams said.

Despite its small size, this garage can still provide monstrous results and monstrous savings for the Air Force. Maybe that's why they call it the "Monster Garage."