TINKER--Hayward “Marty” Martin’s days are spent working on aircraft.He does it all day long, but when he gets home, the work continues….on model aircraft, that is.
“I enjoy it,” said Mr. Martin, an aircraft mechanic with the 564th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron at Tinker U.S. Air Force Base. “It’s relaxing. This is [the source of] my sanity.”
Mr. Martin rigs the control cables on the KC-135 tanker aircraft, supporting the post-maintenance efforts and pre-test flight support for the aircraft coming out of maintenance at Tinker.
It’s important work that doesn’t stop until the aircrews are satisfied and the aircraft is on its way back to the squadron.
“If they find something wrong,” Mr. Martin said, “we go out there and support them.
“If the flight crew finds a defect, we go out there and fix it.”
But Mr. Martin, in a way, likes to take his work home with him, unwinding by re-creating in scale some of the aircraft he’s maintained during his air force and civilian careers.
He got his start watching his brother build model cars.
“I used to watch my brother build models,” he remembered. “Bless his heart, he had the patience to teach me.”
But cutting, gluing and painting scale models can be a challenge, especially for a 9-year-old youngster (as Mr. Martin was) just starting to learn.
“The first ones were bad,” Mr. Martin admitted.
With patience and practice, though, he got better.
After his son spotted a model display at a hobby shop at a local mall, Mr. Martin joined a modeling club.
After being encouraged by members of the club, Mr. Martin entered his first model contest in 2003, which was hosted by the local chapter of the International Plastic Modelers Society.
He, eventually, won a national award for his depiction of a KC-135 that had exploded during ground pressurization tests after undergoing maintenance at Tinker.
“That was the first time it had left the house,” Mr. Martin commented. “I never thought they were good enough.”
Like any good aircraft mechanic, Mr. Martin is meticulous in his research and attention to detail.
That shows in the model of an AC-130 Specter he built for a friend based at Hurlburt Field, Fla., where the real aircraft are based.
“Just the cockpit alone took two weeks,” Mr. Martin said. “The simple part was just putting the aircraft together.”
“If I get in one of my moods,” the aircraft mechanic continued, “I’ll get pics of the real thing and try to make a model as close as I can to the real thing.
“If I can see it, I’ll try to do it.”
He likes to work on large-scale models or models of large aircraft, pointing out that the larger models allow him to add detail lost on a smaller scale model.
Often, he’ll have two or three kits on the go at the same time, working on one while waiting for glue or paint to dry on another.
Mr. Martin also likes to model some of Tinker’s more unusual visitors, such as NASA’s Boeing 707 Vomit Comet aircraft used for weightless training of astronauts.
Mr. Martin’s version even includes models of two “weightless” astronaut trainees floating around the padded interior.
“You try to make it look like what it does in real life,” the aircraft modeler stated.
His models tend to tell a story, such as his diorama (a three-dimensional miniature model of an aircraft enclosed in a glass showcase) depicting a KC-135 undergoing depot maintenance.
That is not just a model airplane, he said, but a small-scale representation of the vital work done at Tinker.
“This is one of the most important aircraft in the air force inventory,” the aircraft mechanic emphasized. “The people out here do an amazing job keeping them going.”
“We’ve got some aircraft in here from 1957 and ‘58,” he said, proudly. “These are 50-year-old aircraft.
“I worked on one that was built the same year I was born--1957--and she’s still going strong.”
Although he has more than 700 models in his collection, there is always a new model in the works.
His latest is building a diorama depicting an E-3 AWACS that suffered a collapsed nose gear.
“I think I bit off a bit more than I can chew with this one,” he said, “but I’m going to do it.”
