2 Air Force cargo planes report for boot camp duty

A hulking Air Force C-130 touched down at Kelly Field, Texas, late last month for the final time in its three-decade flying career. Though aging, the plane arrived at the home of the Air Force’s basic training with a history of notable heritage flights.

In 2026, the plane dropped parachute teams of Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, and Air Force special ops troops over Normandy, France, as part of a D-Day commemoration flying over Omaha Beach.

In 2024, it made a similar heritage flight, dropping paratroopers from the Army’s 82nd Airborne over Eindhoven, Netherlands, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Operation Market Garden.

Beyond those recent high-profile flights, the plane, which entered service in 1998, spent most of its career in West Virginia and Montana Air National Guard units, flying hundreds of less glamorous but real-world mobility missions to and from war zones and deployed units in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

With its arrival at Lackland Air Force Base, adjacent to Kelly Field, the plane’s days commemorating past missions came to an end. But in a post-flying role, the cargo plane will now be one of two C-130s the Air Force will use as a hands-on training plane for newly recruited airmen in boot camp, which the Air Force calls Basic Military Training, or BMT.

The two C-130s will not fly as part of BMT, but will be the training beds on which new recruits learn and practice basic skills needed to keep planes flying at remote airbases.

“By introducing the airframes into the training environment, BMT provides trainees with exposure to airfield operations and the operational Air Force long before they reach their first duty stations,” Air Force officials said in a release. “Trainees will learn skills to include cargo loading, aircraft refueling, and aircraft marshaling.”

Future airmen will train on both the C-130s and a retired F-16 at the 737th Training Group’s Air Base Training Range. The retired F-16 arrived at Lackland last summer. Airmen in BMT use the jet to learn and practice fighter-specific skills like loading bombs and missiles.

As the two C-130s landed on Aug. 25, they were met, appropriately, by a campaign-hatted BMT drill instructor, whom the Air Force calls a Military Training Instructor, or MTI. Tech. Sgt. Nathaniel Brown, a master MTI with the 322nd Training Squadron, met the planes as they taxied off the base’s runway as a marshaller, guiding one into its assigned parking spot.

Prior to duty as an MTI, Brown served as an aircraft crew chief who routinely marshaled their planes before and after flights.