Any tribute to Navy aviation must include a consideration of the pioneers, aircraft, politics, operational concepts, and tactics that together propelled it from primitive aircraft barely capable of operations aboard ships or over vast ocean areas to the most potent and lethal combination of aircraft represented by a modern carrier. Any tribute to what is arguably the greatest leap in technology over a single one-hundred-year period presents the huge problem of what to include and what not to include. Thus the pages that follow have been organized to include as much information as possible on topics of central importance to an understanding of the evolution of Navy aviation as a warfighting tool in the nation’s arsenal. Essential to accomplishing this is an understanding of the manner in which aircraft were embraced by the Navy’s senior leadership in their nascent state, what roles and missions were envisioned for them, and how those roles and missions evolved and expanded over time. Additionally, with respect to the capabilities of most likely adversaries, the manner in which Navy Air was introduced into the fleet, the bureaucracy that developed to foster Navy Air capabilities and activities, and the way in which aviation was treated in American war planning—all these issues and dynamics will be addressed in the first part of this book.
The second part of the book is focused on preparations for war with Japan and the totalitarian threats in Europe. Of particular interest are aircraft carrier design and aircraft technology, capabilities and manufacturing developments. The series of twenty-one Fleet Problems and periodic Grand Joint Exercises conducted in the interwar period that enabled Navy leaders to formulate and refine aviation doctrine and tactics are examined. This book looks closely at the competing ideas on the proper mission for American carriers and their aircraft, displacement and design trade-offs, and treaty limitations affecting mission accomplishment. Also analyzed is the need to project technological advances in aircraft accurately to maximize the prospects for success in an increasingly likely war with Japan.
The third section in this volume probes developments in helicopter- and land-based Navy aviation. Most importantly, it considers the huge risk associated with the transition from straight-wing propeller-driven aircraft after World War II to high-speed swept-wing jets necessitated by the Cold War. This section puts these developments in perspective by considering the part played by Navy aviation in the Korean and Vietnam wars.
Finally, a chapter is devoted to post–World War II trade-offs in aircraft carrier design and capabilities. This chapter ties in nicely with that on the transition to swept-wing supersonic jets. The trade-off of lives lost and aircraft crashed in bringing American Navy aviation to a state of technological sophistication necessary to support their varied missions today was one realized and accepted by Navy leaders in order to make carriers effective. It is also a tribute to those who have worn the Wings of Gold and their courage and sacrifice. Through the entire hundred-year history of Navy aviation, their willingness to accept the risks of the job has been essential to preserving America’s freedoms.
From the first landing and subsequent take-off from a wooden platform on the cruiser Pennsylvania by Eugene Burton Ely on 18 January 1911 to the first Navy pilot to set foot on the moon, Neil Alden Armstrong, on 20 July 1969, a mere fifty-eight years had passed. Never in history had such a rapid evolution in a new technology taken place. Keeping pace with this evolution was a similar one in aircraft carriers. Moreover, a blistering change from prop to jet aircraft was under way that was not complete until fleet introduction of the F-18 Hornet on 7 January 1983 and modifications to it that followed. The costs to the men who flew Navy aircraft during this period was tremendous, but progress was steady. Today, thanks to their courage, sacrifices, and tenacity, the United States Navy has carrier Air Wings capable of responding to crises anywhere around the world.
NOTES
1.John Gillespie Magee Jr. poem “High Flight.”
2.This was a statement made frequently by instructor pilots while I was undergoing pilot training in Meridian, Mississippi, and Beeville, Texas. It relates to less than two percent of humans having ever landed on an aircraft carrier. At the time, few if any of us had any comprehension of or appreciation for the danger inherent in our chosen profession. Reminders such as this were, in retrospect, intended to boost our confidence psychologically beyond rational limits—an absolute necessity for all Navy pilots.
CHAPTER 2
The Experimental Era: U.S. Navy Aviation before 1916
Stephen K. Stein
INTRODUCTION
On 14 November 1910, Eugene Ely flew a fifty-horsepower Curtiss pusher biplane off an 82-foot platform hastily constructed on the cruiser Birmingham. The plane cleared the ship, but then dropped rapidly. Its propeller touched the water, shattering its tips, as Ely, hampered by a bulky lifejacket and blinded as water sprayed across his goggles, struggled to gain altitude. Successful, he flew his damaged plane toward the Norfolk Navy Yard. He landed his damaged aircraft at Willoughby Spit five minutes later after a two-mile flight.
The person who arranged this record-making flight, the first take-off of an airplane from a ship, was Navy Captain Washington Irving Chambers. The bureaucratic obstacles and other challenges Chambers overcame to arrange this simple demonstration exemplify the problems he and other aviation enthusiasts faced promoting aviation and building a Navy aviation program in the years before the United States entered World War I. From the first glimmerings of interest in Navy aviation in 1898 to 1916, when the United States began to prepare for major war, aviation advocates faced an uphill struggle that tested their endurance, technical skills, and their acumen for political and bureaucratic maneuvering. In this experimental era, aviation proponents had to prove aircraft both safe and of military utility before they could integrate them into existing military organizations. In the United States, they faced doubting superior officers, a skeptical and penurious Congress, rival inventors, and a slew of bureaucratic impediments and technological factors that singly and in combination hindered innovation and the dissemination of aircraft throughout the Army and Navy.
THE BEGINNINGS OF MILITARY AVIATION
Practical aviation began more than a century earlier with the balloon flights of the Montgolfier brothers who first ascended in one of their creations in 1783. A decade later, France’s Revolutionary Army deployed observation balloons at several battles. Napoleon, though, found little use for them and military ballooning disappeared over the next generation. During the American Civil War, civilian aeronauts, particularly John Wise, John La Mountain, and Thaddeus S. C. Lowe, operated balloons for the Union Army. These included balloon flights off the collier George Washington Parke Curtis and transport Fanny, which marked the birth of Navy aviation. In the first of these, in August 1861, La Mountain ascended from the George Washington Parke Curtis, then anchored in off Sewell’s Point in Hampton Roads, and sketched Confederate fortifications and artillery positions while hoping to locate the CSS Virginia.1 Historian Craig Symonds jokes that this was the first American aircraft carrier.
Despite some successes, the Army abandoned balloon operations before the war’s end. Yet when U.S. troops landed in Cuba in 1898, they brought an observation balloon and its crew helped direct the American advance until Spanish rifle fire brought it down. These balloon flights demonstrated the potential for aviation to transform warfare, but balloons proved too slow, vulnerable, and slow to deploy to inaugurate that transformation. Militaries needed more effective aerial units and, in the last years of the nineteenth century, funded several pioneers exploring heavier-than-air and powered flight.
Researchers around the world struggled to unravel the mysteries of flight as the nineteenth century neared its end; the more prominent included machinegun inventor Hiram Maxim in Great Britain, Clement Ader in France, and Otto Lilienthal, the “Flying Prussian.” Later revered as the father of hang gliding, Lilienthal made more than two thousand flights in a variety of gliders before dying in a crash in August 1896. Maxim lost control of his business, a
nd with it support for aviation research, while Ader’s bat-shaped Avion III stubbornly refused to fly in its 1898 trials. Others proved equally unsuccessful. While aeronautic research continued in Europe, attention turned to airships, which Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin in Germany and Alberto Santos-Dumont, then living in Paris, regularly demonstrated after 1900.
Beginning in 1887, Samuel Pierpont Langley, the Director of the Smithsonian Institution, built successively larger gliders and steam-powered model aircraft, one of which flew for ninety seconds on 6 May 1896, traveling three thousand feet. Langley extended this to a mile in later tests and his continued success brought him to the attention of prominent individuals including Alexander Graham Bell; Charles Walcott, the Director of the Geological Survey; and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt who arranged a joint Army–Navy Board to examine recent flight research on the eve of the Spanish-American War. This six-member board, chaired by Commander Charles H. Davis, the Naval Observatory’s director, concluded that it would soon be possible to build a heavier-than-air craft capable of carrying a pilot and a small cargo. They recommended funding Langley’s research and suggested that aircraft could soon be used for reconnaissance and spotting, carrying messages between military forces, and bombing enemy camps and fortifications. Unfortunately, the members of the Navy’s Construction Board (the Chief of Naval Intelligence and the chiefs of the bureaus of Construction and Repair, Equipment, Ordnance, and Steam Engineering) declared aviation research premature and unsuited to the Navy.2
Naval History and Heritage Command
Eugene B. Ely flies his Curtiss pusher airplane from USS Birmingham (CV-2), 14 November 1910. The USS Roe, serving as plane guard, is visible in the background.
The Army, though, found $50,000 for Langley who over the next five years built his full-sized aircraft. Dubbed the Aerodrome (due to Langley’s poor command of Greek), it was powered by a fifty-two-horsepower gasoline engine built by his assistants Stephen Balzer and Charles Manly who would fly the craft. Scaled up from models without sufficient redesign and testing, the fragile Aerodrome lacked landing gear and had only a small rudder for control. Launched by a spring catapult from a houseboat on the Potomac River on 7 October 1903, the craft plunged into the river after a strut snagged the launch mechanism. Launched again two months later on 8 December, the Aerodrome’s rear wings buckled after only a brief moment in the air. It crashed into the Potomac, though Manly again survived.3
Langley’s failures confirmed the doubts of skeptics, including Rear Admiral George W. Melville, one of the most respected engineers in the Navy. Two years earlier, Melville pronounced heavier-than-air flying machines “absurd” and condemned aviation research by noting that there was “no field where so much inventive seed has been sown with so little return as in the attempts of man to fly successfully through the air.”4 Government funding for aviation met the same fate as Langley’s Aerodrome, vanishing under a hail of criticism and condemnation. Langley, himself, died a few years later in 1906.
THE WRIGHT BROTHERS
While Langley’s failures received full, and rather harsh, attention in the press, Orville and Wilbur Wright achieved the first powered, sustained, and controlled flight in relative obscurity on 17 December 1903, nine days after the second and final crash of Langley’s Aerodrome. Through painstaking research, the Wrights corrected the errors of their predecessors and built on their successes, fusing the work of several designers. Unlike many of their predecessors, they recognized the importance of controlling flight in all three dimensions (pitch, roll, and yaw). They used glider data and wind tunnel tests to build a better airfoil and develop control mechanisms, and successfully integrated diverse technologies into a single airframe. As aviation historian Richard Hallion notes, they recognized the importance of “progressive flight research and flight testing” and followed “an incremental path from theoretical understanding through ground-based research methods” and then flight trials of a succession of models until they worked their way to piloted aircraft. After several successful flights, a wind gust smashed the Flyer. The Wrights returned home to Dayton, Ohio, with the wreckage and spent the next two years refining and improving their design. Their new 1905 Flyer seated two people and was capable of long flights, such as Wilbur’s twenty-four-mile, thirty-eight-minute flight on 5 October. Finding buyers for their plane proved difficult, though, and they soon focused on the military as the only likely purchaser of significant numbers of aircraft.5
Despite their disappointment with Langley, several Army Signal Corps officers kept abreast of aviation developments. In 1907, Major George O. Squire toured Europe to study aviation developments.6 That August, the Army created an Aeronautical Division within the Signal Corps. Prodded by civilian aviation enthusiasts, particularly the members of the Aero Club of America (formed in 1905 by members of the Automobile Club of America) and President Theodore Roosevelt, the division advertised the world’s first specifications for a military aircraft. Of the twenty-four bidders, only the Wrights delivered a working airplane.
While Wilbur took one plane to France, where he astounded audiences, Orville flew their new Military Flyer for the Army in a succession of test flights at Fort Meyer, Virginia, in the summer of 1908. The several thousand witnesses included two Navy observers: Naval Constructor William McEntee and Lieutenant George W. Sweet, a radio expert who had developed an interest in aviation. Orville took several passengers aloft including Squire, but the demonstrations ended when a propeller blade shattered—its fragments sliced through bracing wires—and the plane plunged to the ground seriously injuring Orville and killing his passenger, Army Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, the first airplane fatality. A champion of aviation who had ascended in giant kites and contributed to the work of the Aerial Experiment Association, a group led by Alexander Graham Bell, Selfridge would be missed.7
The crash delayed the remaining tests until the following summer when the Wrights again astounded observers with both their plane and their aeronautic acumen. Sweet, who had traded places with Selfridge the previous year, finally flew as a passenger on 9 November, becoming the first American Navy officer to fly. The Army accepted the Military Flyer into service that August, making it the world’s first military Service with an airplane. Supported by Rear Admiral William S. Cowles, the Chief of the Bureau of Equipment, Sweet recommended that the Navy purchase airplanes. The Navy’s senior leadership, though, dismissed the idea. Speaking for them, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Beekman Winthrop declared that airplanes had not “progressed sufficiently at this time for use in the Navy.”8
France hosted the first international air show and flying competition later that summer. Twenty-five aircraft competed for prizes at the Reims Air Meet (22–29 August 1909), which showcased aeronautic progress. While American Glenn Curtiss won two trophies for speed in his Reims Racer, European aircraft and aviators dominated the other events. The Wrights, concerned about infringement on their patents, refused to participate, though several contestants flew Wright aircraft. The U.S. Navy’s observer at the show, Commander Frederick L. Chapin, recommended deploying airplanes on battleships and building new ships with flight decks. The Navy dismissed his recommendations, as it had Sweet’s, but Glenn Curtiss would prove difficult to ignore.9
Curtiss, who set a world speed record riding one of his motorcycles in 1907, expanded his business into aircraft engines and then airplanes over the next few years. Flying airplanes of his own design, he quickly won several prizes including the $10,000 Bennett Prize for the fastest twenty-kilometer flight and the Prix de la Vitesse for averaging 46.63 mph over thirty kilometers at Reims. The following year, the flamboyant inventor flew one of his new planes 137 miles (with two stops to refuel) down the Hudson River from Albany to New York City to win a $10,000 prize offered by the New York World. Afterward he told reporters that airplanes would soon take off from ships and that warships were already vulnerable to air attack. “The battles of the future,” he proclaimed, would “be fought
in the air.” In July Curtiss flew over a battleship-sized target on Lake Keuka and dropped eight-inch lengths of lead pipe on it, striking it repeatedly. The stunt encouraged the New York Times to join the World in trumpeting the military possibilities of aviation.10
THE U.S. NAVY DISCOVERS AVIATION
The Wrights’ 1908 demonstrations at the Reims air show and other aerial exhibitions highlighted the new possibilities of military aviation. After Reims, all of Europe’s major powers increased their aviation spending and research. The U.S. Navy’s leaders, though, proved slow to recognize aviation’s potential and balked at funding aviation research.
A certain amount of skepticism and penny-pinching was to be expected. The U.S. Navy had just completed the greatest transformation in its history. Captivated by the writings of Alfred Thayer Mahan, Congress funded an enormous expansion of the fleet including more than two dozen new battleships, as Mahan’s disciples reoriented strategy from commerce raiding and coast defense to seeking command of the sea through decisive capital ship engagements. The United States soon boasted one of the largest and most modern fleets in the world. Each new class of battleships grew in size and armament, carrying guns so large that directing accurate fire became a problem. The 12-inch guns of the new battleship Michigan (BB-27), for example, could fire shells out to 21,000 yards. Under the best conditions, though, the ship’s spotters could only see out to 16,000 yards. The Navy experimented with sending spotters aloft in kites and kite-balloons, but as with balloons on land, these proved problematic. Practical airplanes and airships appeared as the world’s navies worked to solve this problem, though most naval officers failed to see their potential.
While the fleet expanded and officers improved their technical skills, much of the Navy’s administration remained rooted in the past. To simplify the Navy’s convoluted administrative structure and reduce the power of its eight bureaus, which despite a generation of reform continued to operate as independent fiefdoms, Secretary of the Navy George Meyer introduced the Aide System on 1 December 1909. Four aides (operations, personnel, inspection, and material), who reported directly to the Secretary of the Navy, would oversee different bureaus and encourage their cooperation. The Aide for Material oversaw the Navy’s four technical bureaus: Construction and Repair, Ordnance, Engineering, and Equipment. Congress never sanctioned this arrangement, which failed to resolve fully the centurylong problem of interbureau cooperation. Bureau chiefs maintained substantial independence, particularly over their finances, which Congress continued to allocate to individual bureaus in annual naval appropriations.11
One Hundred Years of U.S. Navy Air Power Page 2