The Cradle of Naval Aviation

Naval Air Station Pensacola was commissioned on January twentieth, nineteen fourteen, and the entire command that arrived consisted of a handful of officers, twenty-three enlisted men, seven seaplanes, some spare parts, and a few canvas hangars. From that modest inventory, an institution grew that would train more than one hundred thousand naval aviators over the following century.

The Navy chose Pensacola for reasons that are still obvious from the air: calm protected waters in the bay for seaplane operations, year-round flying weather, and enough open space to build an airfield without displacing a major city. By World War One, the station was training dozens of pilots a year. By World War Two, the number reached tens of thousands.

During World War Two, Naval Air Station Pensacola and its network of auxiliary fields trained over twenty-eight thousand naval aviators. The station ran flight training, aviation medicine, naval photography, and gunnery instruction simultaneously. Pilots of the station actually engaged enemy forces directly, flying patrols against German submarines operating in the Gulf of Mexico.

In the winter of nineteen fifty-four and fifty-five, the Navy's flight demonstration team relocated to Pensacola from Corpus Christi, Texas. That team is the Blue Angels, founded in nineteen forty-six under Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz to showcase naval aviation and build public confidence in the fleet. Every year they fly practice sessions over the base and perform at the annual Pensacola air show, low passes over Pensacola Bay at speeds that make the windows rattle all the way downtown.

The National Naval Aviation Museum here at the station is free to the public and holds more than one hundred fifty aircraft, from World War One biplanes to an early space capsule to the Blue Angels' retired jets. It is among the most-visited museums in Florida and arguably the finest aviation museum in the American South.