The 913th Airlift Group is an Air Force Reserve unit at Little Rock Air Force Base, Arkansas, with no aircraft assigned to its unit authorization document. Its primary mission is nonetheless to train and equip maintenance Airmen who go on to work as crew chiefs, hydraulics technicians and avionics specialists — work that normally depends on flight-line access the unit does not have.
Under Tech. Sgt. Austin Malanowski, the group's Virtual Reality Training Center program coordinator, the unit converted a decommissioned storage area into what it describes as a virtual maintenance hangar. Airmen practise maintenance procedures on virtual airframes instead of live aircraft. "Effectively, we went from zero aircraft to five virtual platforms," Malanowski said. He describes the content as drawn from an existing catalogue rather than commissioned for the unit: "With this new system, I can load any aircraft that exist across the Department of War's mass virtual system into this VR program."
The capability was modelled on an existing facility on the same base. Tech. Sgt. Joshua Hale, training development team chief at the Little Rock Air Force Base Virtual Reality Center in Building 350, said his larger facility served as the template for the 913th Maintenance Squadron's scaled-down version, with his team supplying technical guidance and lessons learned during implementation. "Our VR dodged all the bullets that their VR hit on the way up because they gave me that information," Malanowski said.
The unit reports that the programme mitigated an estimated $18.5 million in training and maintenance costs over the 18 months to August 2026. The release publishes no methodology, no baseline for the flight-line hours displaced, and no split between training time and avoided maintenance damage, so the figure should be read as the unit's own directional estimate rather than an audited saving. No vendor, headset or contract value appears in the release.
Beyond cost, the unit cites repetition without risk to aircraft, and training that is unaffected by aircraft availability or by Arkansas summer heat and winter cold. Hale said immersive training at Little Rock is expanding beyond aircraft maintenance, with modules planned for aircrew, security forces and medical personnel, while the 913th is developing requirements to bring loadmaster training into its own environment.
