Monster Garage wins award, saves money

  • Published
  • By Lee Ross
  • Nucleus
Kirtland AFB, N.M. --  With a little ingenuity and a lot of elbow grease, the 58th Training Squadron's Trainer Development Flight, the "Monster Garage," is saving the Air Force millions of dollars.

The fabricators were given an Air Force Productivity Excellence award for 2014 at the Air Education and Training Command level and are now in the running for an Air Force-level award for the initiative, innovation, and proficiency they demonstrated building a training apparatus for the MC-130H loadmaster aircrew.

The new training device is one of many training apparatuses at the Monster Garage. It replaces a C-130A trainer, which was used to train loadmasters until about a year ago.
The C-130A first saw production in the late 1950s. The old trainer was used to teach students to operate an MC-130H, an aircraft that has been used since the 1990s for low-altitude special operations missions.

According to 58th Special Operations Wing Commander Col. Dagvin Anderson, the updated trainer has greatly improved students' ability to learn.
Anderson said using the old trainer was "similar to using a 1960s Corvette to teach a mechanic how to fix a 2013 Corvette."

A military contractor estimated it would cost $15 million to build an updated trainer, Anderson said. But fabricators at the Monster Garage suggested they could build the apparatus themselves. Although maintaining and updating aircrew-training devices is within the group's scope of work, nothing like this had ever been accomplished before, much less suggested, Anderson said.

The project was approved and the fabricators found an MC-130E Combat Talon I airframe, which would need quite a bit of work to convert to an MC-130H Combat Talon II trainer.

The chosen aircraft, which was retired on Sept. 18, 2012, was flown from an airfield in Florida to Kirtland. Monster Garage fabricators set to work stripping down the airframe and making it into a Fuselage Trainer, or FuT, for local students.

They safely disposed of the fuel in its wings, along with other hazardous materials, removed the wings, clipped the propellers, and removed roughly 81 cubic feet of wiring from the plane, among a multitude of other tasks. They installed new wiring -- about 5,000 feet of it -- and modified the cargo bay and other areas needed for loadmaster training.

After approximately 18 months, the airframe was functionally identical to an MC-130H Combat Talon II. According to Maj. Rob Faith, assistant operations officer for the Trainer Development Flight, some of that time was spent waiting on materials and contracts to come through.

Students began training on the new apparatus in May 2014.

All told, the device cost $150,000 -- 100 times less than the contractor's estimates. Faith added that the savings are also considerable when compared to the cost of using an aircraft from the flightline.

The Talon II training device is so close to the real thing that almost all of a loadmaster's training can be completed on the ground -- and at a fraction of the cost, Faith said. It costs the Air Force more than $14,000 per hour to use an actual MC-130H, while the cost of using the trainer is little more than the cost of turning on the lights in the Monster Garage.

Once students complete training on the device at the Monster Garage, they just have to go up and make sure they don't get airsick while performing their job.

"It's a one-of-a-kind," Faith said. "Now we're looking to build an MC-130J training apparatus to the same fidelity."