 is the weapon today. Naval aviation five decades after its birth. Supersonic aircraft that dominate the skies over the ocean areas of the world. The carrier moves swiftly to a point of rendezvous with its far-ranging aircraft. The night and tomorrow, the operation will be repeated as naval aviation guards America's sea frontiers. It is here on the flight deck in the busy hangers and shops in the ready room and in the darkness of CIC that fifty years of history have made their mark. A half century of progress, experiment and vision. A story that has not yet had its final chapter. Just seven years after the right flight at Kitty Hawk. Far-sighted Navy strategists assigned Captain Washington Irving Chambers the job of observing and reporting on aviation developments of particular concern to the Navy. In November 1910, Eugene Ealy, civilian pilot, successfully flew his Curtis-built plane off the deck of the cruiser Birmingham. In another demonstration a few months later, Ealy used a crude arresting gear of cables and sandbags to land on the cruiser Pennsylvania. Doubters were convinced. An appropriation of $25,000 in 1911 procured for the Navy its first land plane and two sea planes like this one. Three planes and one aviator. Lieutenant T. G. Ellison trained by Glenn Curtis. The first aviation training camp was established at Annapolis in 1911. A very small group of officer students including the first marine aviator Lieutenant A. A. Cunningham began to study the problems of flight. Catapult experiments from barges and later from ships were begun in 1912. Sea plane operations had developed to the point where sea plane units could take part in the Mexican intervention of 1914. At Vera Cruz, a plane piloted by Lieutenant later Admiral Bellinger was fired upon. The first Navy plane damaged in combat. World War I gave naval aviation a chance to show what it had learned during its short existence. Nearly 3,000 planes were built by Curtis, Martin, Boeing and others. Thousands of pilots and observers were trained to utilize the Navy's new weapon. This was essential. German U-boats were threatening our supply lines and periling the Allied effort. The Naval Aviation Unit commanded by Lieutenant Kenneth Whiting was one of the first American groups to reach Europe. From coast bases in England, Italy and France, flyers took off on U-boat patrols and raided German submarine pens on the North Sea. The Navy's non-recoiling rifle was developed as an anti-submarine weapon. Naval aircraft designers had learned much from early wartime experiences. Their combined design talents produced the NC patrol planes, a joint effort of Curtis and Navy. These were completed too late to see action, however, but a greater future was planned for them. Under Commander John Towers, three of the NC's left New York in May 1919 to attempt a transatlantic flight to Portugal via Newfoundland and the Azores. The NC-4 made it all the way. The NC-4 skipper, Lieutenant Commander Albert Reed and his crew were given a dignified welcome in England and a noisy one in New York. Now came the 1920s, a period of rapid development in aircraft and flight operations. Established to conduct the expanding program of naval air, the Bureau of Aeronautics, under its first chief, Rear Admiral William Moffat, began to shape the destiny of aviation in naval planning. Main purpose? To send planes to sea on ships. First, turrets of capital ships were rigged to launch aircraft. Equipment was not always dependable. To take the risk out of such launchings, catapults were strengthened so that cruisers and battleships could carry their own aerial scouts. Successful takeoffs sent mines leaping ahead to the next logical step. Ships that could carry many planes, floating airfields, to provide the concentration of force necessary for effective sea air attack. The time for the aircraft carrier was near. What exhaustive tests with the resting gear had first to be conducted on land, to find some way of stopping a fast plane from crashing into parked aircraft. By 1922, a resting gear was available that could do the job, and it was installed on the Navy's first carrier. A decked over old Collier christened the USS Langley. Lieutenant Godfrey Chevalier, one of naval aviation's pioneers, made the Navy's first carrier landing in an aero marine. There was still much to learn about deck operations. But nothing discouraged the determined aviators. They kept trying. This was a new problem, demanding the utmost in skill and precision. These pioneers risked their lives to gain experience, to test new ideas, and perfect new techniques. And determination paid off. Carrier operations became routine, a model of speed and efficiency. And the Navy had a new weapon to use with the big guns of the battle plane, working with the first wind tunnel models to create aircraft specially adapted to the Navy's needs. These new plane types, the Hell Diver, became world famous for dive bombing accuracy. Marine and Navy interest in this precise form of bombing paid off in a big way when war came. Bombing of land and sea objectives was an art, one that had been perfected by years of practice and teamwork. The Washington Disarmament Conference of 1922 forced us to scrap plans for two half-built battle cruisers, but allowed them to be converted and completed as aircraft carriers. The Secretary of the Navy demonstrated how landings and takeoffs were to be made from their decks, much longer and wider than the Langley's. These two carriers were christened Saratoga and Lexington, beginning the tradition of naming aircraft carriers for great battles. Both participated in the war games of the late 20s. These exercises confirmed beliefs that carrier-based and operated aircraft would open a new era of sea air power. The Saratoga and the Lexington were joined by others in the 30s. The Ranger, Yorktown, Enterprise, Hornet and Wasp, four runners of a mighty armada soon to come. In 1925, Commander John Rogers on the right and a crew of four men left San Francisco in the first attempt to fly to Hawaii. The PN-9, their metal hulled flying boat, set a world's distance record of 1,800 miles before being forced down at sea. Rigging a wing as a sail, Commander Rogers proved himself a seamen as well as an airman, sailing the PN-9 the remaining 450 miles to Hawaii. The constant effort to build long-range capabilities into naval patrol aircraft resulted in improved flying boat design. What the Navy learned about the Great Catalina was passed on to civilian airlines, aiding the inauguration of scheduled trans-Pacific flights in 1936. The highly accurate Northern bomb site was developed under Navy auspices and became the standard site for U.S. horizontal bombing aircraft. The bulky undercarriage of the earlier fighters was eventually replaced by retractable landing gear. Decreasing drag and increasing speed gave way to the monoplane and speeds jumped again. All the developments since the First World War, the long-range flying boat, the torpedo plane, the concept of a mobile task force, the development of tough and powerful fighters, and above all, the superb training of pilots and crewmen were soon called to meet the greatest challenge our Navy had yet faced. Japanese carrier aircraft struck. When the smoke had cleared and losses were evaluated, our Pacific fleet was temporarily out of action. Glooms settled thickly over the country. But the Navy's top strategists thanked God that all our carriers were at sea December 7th, and though few in number, were ready to launch their planes in counter-attack. Now naval aviation would be given an opportunity to justify the years of its development, the training of thousands of men, the time and money and sweat expended on it. Airmen turned grimly to the task before them. The carriers of the Pacific fleet launched a series of raids on the Japanese held islands, the marshals, Wake, and the gilded. In May 1942, they found and stopped the enemy in the Coral Sea. The Japanese were forced to turn back from their gold, lost land. Despite losses, naval air won its first strategic victory and followed it a month later by battering the enemy at midway. This was the turning point of the Pacific War. The enemy was stalled. Hawaii and the United States were spared attack. In the Atlantic, the Navy was fighting another enemy, one it had battled before, the German U-boat, went to the bottom before the U.S. could organize its defenses. Three patrol planes joined forces with surface units to range the Atlantic from Iceland to Rio, across the Caribbean too, searching, searching, searching for the telltale periscope, for the forming wake, for the shadowy reflection of a submarine just below the surface. Blimps joined the hunt as convoy escorts. But all this was not enough. The mid-ocean areas could not be covered by land-based search planes. The Navy's answer was the escort carrier, born of necessity. These hastily built baby flat tops joined the fleet in 1943, and with their planes teamed with destroyers, eventually swept the German U-boats from the Atlantic. The capture and boarding of the U-505 by a jeep carrier and destroyer hunter-killer group, climaxed the Navy's action in the Atlantic. At war's end, naval air power had accounted for 99 enemy submarines. In the Pacific, meanwhile, our offensive was underway. Guadalcanal saw heroic holding action by Navy and Marine airmen, flying from Henderson Field. The offensive gained momentum with new fighters like the Hellcat and the Corsair. Torpedo bombers like the Avenger. Rockets gave a mighty wallop to our Navy planes. Radar came to our aid too, on shipboard, in planes, and in anti-submarine operations. No longer could the enemy attack us in darkness or in fog. The all-seeing eye of Radar would find him, plot his course, and guide our planes in for the kill. The pattern of the Pacific War emerged as one of island hopping across the reaches of the once tranquil ocean. Army and Marine invasion forces relied on naval air, to soften up enemy defenses. Assault leaders spotted enemy emplacements, called for air support to wipe them out. Men in the combat information centers aboard ship plotted quickly, carefully. American lives hung in the balance, waiting for help from the floating airfields. Fighters swept over the beaches, sought the enemy hidden in his bunkers, blasted, strafed, burned until the islands were secure. In the battle of the Philippine Sea in 1944, now remembered as the Marianas Turkey Shoot, naval air scored its greatest triumph over Japanese carrier aircraft. Navy gunners on ship and in the air, and in the space of one day, shot down 400 attacking enemy planes. Japanese naval air was crushed. Its funeral was held at Lady Gulf. Japan fought back with land-based suicide planes, but it was too late. She had been defeated on land, on sea, and most decisively in the air over the sea. Naval aviation had led the way across the Pacific. The Coral Sea, Midway, the Solomons, the Marshals, the Marianas, the Philippines, finally Okinawa, and the Japanese home islands. 1945 saw victory in the Pacific. It was a tribute to the faith and courage of naval aviation pioneers, whose 30-year struggle made this weapon the sinews and muscle of sea power. Naval aviation had established its value in World War II, but the struggle to prove itself was not over. Astonishing technological developments at the eve of victory posed vast perplexing problems for naval aviation, and critics saw in them the doom of the carrier task force. The nuclear weapon, how would the light carrier plane ever be able to employ it effectively, the critics asked? How could the task force survive the devastation of atomic attack? Performance jet planes ever be adapted to operate from the relatively short carrier deck. These were serious problems that threatened the future of the carrier as an important element in our military security. And the history of naval aviation since World War II is largely the story of the solution of these problems. The last half of the 1940s were busy, fruitful years for the naval air arm as it engaged in many far-flung activities. Its aircraft mapped 5,500 miles of the Antarctica coastline. Navy also displayed its new long-ranged reconnaissance capability when its P2V Truculent Turtle made a record-shattering non-stop 11,000-mile flight from Australia to Columbus, Ohio without refueling. A record that still stands today. At sea, the first rocket experiments began. Before the California desert, the Navy's Skystreak plane pierced the upper atmosphere at supersonic speeds. At naval air stations, the first jet planes were being readied for employment on carriers. The FH Phantom, followed by F2H Banshees and F9F Panthers, operating from Essex-class carriers, which now incorporated improved catapults to supplement the low initial power of the jets and improved arresting gear to absorb the impact of 130 miles per hour landing speeds. The Korean action found naval aviation midway in its transition from World War II to a modern weapon system. Aided by reserves of men and planes, naval air was ready to strike back the moment the Korean War started. Navy and Marine airmen flew round the clock strikes to cripple the enemy's communications and transport. Close air support of the troops at the front became a specialty. The concept of carrier aviation devised so long ago by the pioneers, once again proved a powerful force. Because of the carrier's mobility, naval air was able to attack anywhere on the Korean Peninsula. Ship and shore-based helicopters transported men and material in assault support. Evacuated wounded to hospital ships. Rescued Americans trapped behind enemy lines. The pace of progress in technology quickened at the close of the Korean War. The forest doll, the giant modern attack carrier, the dream of the late Admiral Mark Mitchell became a reality. In it was the solution to many of the nagging problems that the post-war Navy had faced. Its armored decks were reinforced to handle multi-engined aircraft. Its steam catapults can thrust a 35 ton bomber into the air with ease. The angled deck solved the problem of swift simultaneous launching and recovery of aircraft. Their landing system coupled with precision carrier control approach techniques ensured rapid safe recoveries. The construction of forest doll and its sister ships was paralleled in progress in anti-submarine warfare. With the application of naval aviation becoming increasingly important, the hunter-killer team concept integrates surface ships with carrier-based aircraft, sea planes, and land-based patrol planes. All of these aircraft incorporated advanced electronic systems for detecting and locating submarines and use a variety of weapons for making the kill. It was also the Navy which provided for the extension of our northern due line air defense system. Navy warning star radar planes now patrol the ocean flanks of the continent, from Hawaii to the Aleutians, from Newfoundland to the Azores, maintaining constant electronic surveillance of these avenues of attack. The helicopter, not even a dream 50 years ago, has assumed an important role in naval aviation. As well as performing utility duty with the fleet, giant passenger cargo copters are based aboard new vertical assault carriers. These carriers are designed to accommodate 2,000 fully equipped marines. With this new means of amphibious assault, combat troops can be quickly put ashore bypassing enemy shore defenses. Years after the Navy's first attempts at becoming airborne, naval aviation is a vital indispensable force to maintain our security. The major task forces that roam the major ocean areas of the world are ready for immediate action. Their effectiveness in bringing power to bear in critical areas has been demonstrated in the past. Lebanon and Formosa, for example, typical task force is an elusive weapon, dispersed over 50,000 square miles of water. Guarded by supersonic crusader and F-4H phantom fighters, armed with deadly sidewinder and sparrow-three missiles, all its attack planes can employ either conventional or nuclear weapons. 3D, heavier than the flying fortress, is designed for long-range high-altitude missions. While the Navy's smallest attack airplane, the A4D is designed to carry big weapons at low altitude. As the new 1,800-mile-per-hour vigilante bomber makes qualification trials aboard a carrier in the Atlantic, the largest ship in the world and the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier fits out for its first cruise, we have ample evidence that naval aviation is meeting the challenge of the future.