Groom Lake Hush House

reply to post by Shadowhawk


At one point in time, they had a steam exhaust for the hush house. You wouldn't hear a thing from outside, but would just see a plume of steam coming from the exhaust area. Then they suddenly stopped doing that, and it was almost as loud as if they were running the engine outside without being in the house.

When the HiANG switched from the F-4 to the F-15, they eliminated the hush house for a long time, because the F-15 wouldn't fit in it, and they used a test area next to Mike taxiway that was open. They would chain the aircraft down to run the engine up to afterburner.

Hush Houses are used all around the Air Force. They are used to test, troubleshoot and evaluate uninstalled jet engines, all inside a near-soundproof building.

This is from the Nellis link in the first post. So the hush house is only for engines not mounted in airframes. I don't see security being enhanced much at Groom by hiding the engines in the hush house unless satellite technology is way better than I suspect.

The hush house can accommodate engines by themselves or installed in the aircraft.

If the test article is a classified aircraft, then testing its engine indoors provides additional security by hiding the aircraft from uncleared personnel. Also, there is instrumentation and a monitoring station built into the hush house to collect data, which probably makes this technique preferable to simply running the engine inside a hangar with doors open on both ends. Not all hangars have that feature. Also, they lack the extra instrumentation and may contain equipment or hazardous materials that would have to be removed in order to do such a test.

reply to post by Shadowhawk


Well the Nellis press release didn't say the hush house is used "exclusively" for engines on stands, so I guess they are off the hook. I see the Nellis hush house are about 93ft wide. That would hold most fighter type aircraft.

Surely if this is in Groom Lake it must be for a classified type of plane, in the satellite pictures wee can see that the ramp going to the hush house south to north have been rebuilt.

reply to post by gariac


Sometimes, like with the F-15, it's necessary to run both engines at power. So they'll pull it into the hush house, and run them in there. Or like we had to do sometimes, you change something on the engine without completely removing it from the aircraft, so you tow it to the trim pad, or hush house and run it there.

Some great hush house pics:








And this is what happens when you run engines at power, and don't chain the aircraft down properly:

reply to post by darksidius


Since the hush house is located at the Groom Lake facility, it would be used for any test or support aircraft assigned to that base that require analytical engine runs. This includes classified prototypes and technology demonstrators, foreign materiel exploitation project aircraft, and chase/support aircraft (such as the F-16s and F-18s that are often parked on the North Ramp). The hush house is a standard type of aircraft maintenance infrastructure.

All of the aircraft parking ramps at the base have been replaced with new, clean concrete as part of a base-wide effort involving routine airfield maintenance, and to mitigate contamination from hazardous substances such as spilled fuels, lubricants, and deicing fluids. Remember that the original parking ramps were poured in 1960. The alkali nature of the soil is very damaging to concrete, and environmental regulations were far less stringent half a century ago.

Ok thank you, with this hush house you can test everything, the ramp to go in this test house seem new, and may be in futur, connexion to the runway will be built. But there is alimit in the size for the aircraft to the hush hous you can test fighter size but not enough for a bigger plane like a bomber.

Originally posted by darksidius
Okay thank you, with this hush house you can test everything. The ramp to go in the test house seem new, and maybe in future a connection to the runway will be built. But there is a limit in the size for the aircraft to the hush house, as you can only test a fighter size aircraft, but not large enough for a bigger plane, like a bomber.

Correct, and yes I edited your comment a little, to read better for others I'm assuming you translated that to English, or perhaps English isn't your 1st language

Yes, its not my first language I can make little mistake in tranlations sorry.