The U.S. Air Force’s 58th Special Operations Wing trains special operations and combat search-and-rescue aircrews for their demanding missions in a high desert environment.

A couple thousand feet above the desert floor, an Osprey pilot-in-training is cursing their luck as they approach the rear of our MC-130J for aerial refueling. It’s a typical April afternoon in New Mexico, which means that it’s sunny and windy, and the atmosphere west of Albuquerque is sporty. The refueling drogue extending from the tanker’s wing is swinging wildly up and down in the turbulence, mocking the tiltrotor that is attempting to position its probe for a connection.

From our vantage point on the lowered ramp, it seems doubtful that any CV-22 pilot could pull off aerial refueling today, let alone a student with little or no experience in the maneuver. And in fact, it takes a couple of laps back and forth across the practice area before the trainee pilot stops chasing the drogue and the breakthrough moment occurs. The achievement is no less impressive for the time it took them to get there.

“When you first go out there, you take off, it can be as smooth as glass,” said U.S. Air Force 1st Lt. Derek Greenwald, a recent graduate of the CV-22 pilot training program at Kirtland Air Force Base (AFB) in Albuquerque. “But once you get up at altitude, and the winds start to kick in and the turbulence tosses you around a bit, it can get a little challenging.”

While students may not always appreciate that challenge in the moment, New Mexico’s unforgiving environment is precisely why it’s the perfect place to train. The high altitudes, mountain winds, and volcanic dust create uniquely punishing conditions for the aircrews who pass through Kirtland en route to their first operational deployments, ensuring that they’ll be well prepared for whatever the future may throw at them.

“What we want to do is make sure that when our aircrew are here, they’re focused on training, that they experience the most difficult conditions,” explained Col. Michael Curry, commander of the 58th Special Operations Wing, the Air Force’s premier training site for special operations and combat search-and-rescue aircrews, “so that when they encounter [a difficult scenario] in combat or in a real-world situation, they can think back and go, ‘That flight was not as hard as what I had to go through [in training].’”

Distributed presence

While the 58th SOW is headquartered at Kirtland AFB, its operations span the United States. On the East Coast, it maintains a detachment at Marine Corps Air Station New River, North Carolina, where new CV-22 crewmembers conduct their initial tiltrotor training in the MV-22, the Marine Corps version of the Bell-Boeing V-22 Osprey. In Alabama, the wing is responsible for the Air Force’s undergraduate helicopter pilot training at Fort Rucker, better known as the home of U.S. Army Aviation.

Moving west, the wing has another detachment at Lackland AFB near San Antonio, Texas, where it conducts a screening course for prospective survival, evasion, resistance, and escape (SERE) specialists. Its largest presence is a bit further west at Kirtland, where it trains all aircrews for the CV-22, Sikorsky HH-60G, and now HH-60W combat rescue helicopters, Bell UH-1N Hueys, and Lockheed Martin MC-130J and HC-130J special mission and rescue planes.

In Washington state, the 58th SOW trains SERE specialists and runs SERE courses for aircrew and other at-risk personnel at Fairchild AFB in Spokane. Finally, the wing has a “cool school” for Arctic survival training at Eielson AFB near Fairbanks, Alaska.

“One thing that’s interesting about the 58th Special Operations Wing is we’re a tenant wing in every one of our locations, which means we rely on the host base to provide for most of the daily care and feeding of each one of our training programs,” Curry noted. “So that makes relationships the most important thing that we maintain at my level as a wing commander.”

At Kirtland, aircrew training begins with extensive ground and simulator training in the “schoolhouse,” where students will typically spend several months before progressing to the flight line. For all airframes, this training is provided by the 58th Training Squadron (TRS).

According to Maj. Daniel Faulk, “The sheer magnitude and diversity of training conducted by the TRS is a formidable task. We overcome the difficulty of these requirements by employing the best and most experienced professional contracted instructors, a highly experienced civil servant team, and subject matter experts from each weapon system, all with centuries of combined aviation operational and training experience among them. Each training program is given [oversight] by several experienced active-duty instructors, representing each crew position across every airframe.”

Coordinating training for so many different aircraft types is demanding at the best of times, and the Covid-19 pandemic introduced new challenges. Like other learning institutions, the 58th TRS was forced to adapt to fulfilling its mission while minimizing the spread of the novel coronavirus.

“Where we could socially distance, we did. Where we couldn’t, we stood up telecommunication solutions and distance learning platforms to provide students with the same level of academic instruction without setting foot in a classroom,” Faulk explained. “While Covid challenged the method of how we conducted training, it did not reduce our ability to provide the same level of quality training.”

Mission qualification

After students complete their schoolhouse training, they move on to the fun part — flying in the real aircraft. At Kirtland, this flight line training is divided between three squadrons: the 71st Special Operations Squadron (SOS), which is responsible for CV-22 training; the 512th Rescue Squadron (RQS), which trains H-60 and Huey crews; and the 415th SOS, which conducts the training for C-130s.

While course lengths vary, most pilot candidates spend around eight months at Kirtland, with flight line training taking up two to three months of that. By the time they arrive at their aircraft, they know the systems inside and out and have practiced basic flight maneuvers in the simulator. The syllabus thus progresses fairly quickly to day and night tactical operations — things like low-level flying, brownout landings, and air-to-air refueling — which account for most of the 40 to 60 hours they spend in the air.

“There’s a lot of pressure,” acknowledged Maj. Garrett Wilson, an HH-60 rescue pilot and instructor. Especially for those candidates who have not previously experienced a graduate-level training program, he said, “it can be really intense.”

New Mexico’s high desert environment poses special challenges here, and not just with respect to the winds. The elevation of the airfield at Kirtland, which it shares with Albuquerque International Airport, is 5,355 feet (around 1,630 meters) and the nearby Sandia Mountains exceed 10,000 feet (over 3,000 meters). Combine that with warm temperatures for most of the year, and the density altitude can be a shock for pilots who learned to fly at lower elevations, where power is less of a problem.

Then there’s the dust, which boils up into menacing clouds during off-airport landings, day or night. These brownout landings, a staple of desert warfare, are some of the riskier maneuvers that pilots perform, since it’s easy to lose control of an aircraft when your visual references disappear. Practicing them repeatedly during training helps prepare crews for those times when landing in a degraded visual environment is their only option.

Each squadron primarily focuses on its own activities, with an emphasis on imparting the culture and values of its particular airframe community. However, the 415th SOS interfaces frequently with the 512th RQS and 71st SOS for helicopter and tiltrotor air-to-air refueling (called HAAR and TAAR, respectively). Each refueling mission is a training opportunity for the crew of the aircraft that is taking on gas, as well as the one that is providing it.

As Lt. Col. Charles Thomas, commanding officer of the 415th SOS explained, refueling missions require a high level of coordination and standardization to execute safely, especially with inexperienced aircrews. “Whenever you’re dealing with another airframe, you’re not in control [of it],” he said. “We do everything cookie-cutter so we can control the risk.”

Not surprisingly, the 58th SOW also leans heavily on the skills and experience of its instructors to manage the risk of training operations, and to ensure that students are well prepared for the risks they’ll face in combat.

“Our instructors are absolutely incredible,” Curry said, citing the many honors they’ve received over countless demanding missions in service to their country. “When those instructors come back here, teaching students, they can do it from a level of competence and credibility that the students know they’re learning from the very best.”

Empowering maintainers

Although aircrew training is what the 58th SOW is known for, none of the flight line training would happen without dispatch-ready airframes. That makes aircraft maintenance a vital part of the wing’s success. At Kirtland, maintenance activities are organized under the 58th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron (AMXS), which maintains the airframes used for flight training, and the 58th Maintenance Squadron (MXS), which encompasses various specialty shops. Active-duty personnel are responsible for CV-22 and C-130 maintenance, while helicopter maintenance is performed by civilian contractors, all of whom have prior military experience.

As Curry pointed out, maintaining aircraft for initial aircrew training can be much more demanding than maintaining them in an operational environment. That’s because experienced aircrews may be able to dispatch with some equipment inoperative, “but when you’re constrained by a syllabus, [and] you have to make sure that crewmembers are ready to go with all these different qualifications, you don’t have that flexibility,” he said. “The aircraft absolutely has to be near perfect every time that they fly.”

Just as New Mexico’s harsh desert environment creates challenges for aircrews, so too does it create problems for maintenance personnel. All those brownout landings erode paint from rotor blades and chew up engines, particularly on the CV-22, which has Rolls-Royce AE1107C engines on its tilting nacelles. Today, thanks to a new system for compressor washes, the 58th AMXS is getting around 300 hours of service from each Osprey engine — not much, but far better than the 200 to 220 hours it was getting in the past. (Needless to say, the squadron keeps ample spare engines on hand.)

Each maintenance team is empowered to seek out new and better ways of accomplishing their mission. On the C-130 side, the squadron brought in consultants with expertise in the “theory of constraints” to optimize their maintenance planning. Now, instead of striving to maximize the longevity of each life-limited part, the squadron will sacrifice some remaining life in order to replace those parts during other required inspections. Taking aircraft out of service less frequently has translated to an average of two additional tails on the flight line at any given time.

Meanwhile, the CV-22 maintenance team has discovered that scheduling fewer training sorties has resulted in more sorties actually being completed. That’s because a less ambitious schedule gives maintenance personnel more “touch time” with each aircraft between flights, allowing them to perform preventative maintenance and address minor discrepancies before they snowball. “That really was a ground effort coming from the baseline maintenance folks all the way to the top,” Curry said. “We went from having some of the worst maintenance statistics in the Air Force and the CV-22 [community] to having the absolute best.”

Preparing for the future

Over the next few years, the 58th SOW will be adding some new airframes to its purview. Starting at the end of fiscal year 2024 or the beginning of fiscal year 2025, Kirtland will become home to mission qualification training for the AC-130J, the armed version of the C-130 platform.

The 58th SOW will also be partnering with the 908th Airlift Wing at Maxwell AFB in Alabama to train aircrews for the Boeing MH-139 helicopter, a militarized variant of the civilian Leonardo AW139. The MH-139 was selected in 2018 to replace the Air Force’s aging Huey fleet, although the program has been delayed by certification problems, and the Air Force now plans to make a production decision on the helicopter in January 2023.

Meanwhile, the wing is exploring ways to enhance its training offerings with new technologies like virtual and augmented reality. “I think the real key is understanding where technology can help us, and where it really doesn’t provide as much value over what we’re already producing,” Curry remarked. He noted that tablets and other small devices have been helpful for giving students a way to learn basic knowledge at their own pace, so that the wing’s accomplished instructors can focus on high-level concepts, rather than minor details such as switch positions.

As the threat landscape continues to evolve, the 58th SOW expects to adjust its offerings as needed to ensure that its training remains operationally relevant.

“The future operating environment is going to be one that is marked by uncertainty, by an ever-changing environment and threat picture,” Curry said, “so we train those aircrew members, through the disciplined execution of the little things, to be ready for whatever the mission may call upon.”