Author Description

In the coming year, Naval Aviation will reach its centennial. In those 100 years, Naval Aviation has grown from a marginal force fulfilling a niche role in the nation's military strategy, to the centerpiece combat force that is powerfully and uniquely well-suited to conduct expeditionary operations and lethal sea-based power projection. This transformation resulted when visionary men and women looked beyond the obvious realm of the possible and into the promise of the future. That over-the-horizon focal point continues today, ensuring that Naval Aviation's support of our defense and naval strategies is significant, relevant, and uninterrupted. The importance of Naval Aviation is founded on the Navy and Marine Corps partnership. From deployed Marine expeditionary units and aviation combat elements embarked aboard amphibious assault ships conducting expeditionary operations ashore, to Navy and Marine Corps fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft embarked aboard aircraft carriers streaming alongside surface combatants as part of carrier strike groups, Naval Aviation is ideally suited to carry out the national security strategy in any maritime conflict. On 8 May 1911, Captain Washington Irving Chambers, the officer in charge of aviation, requisitioned the Navy's first aircraft-an A-1 Triad-from aviator and inventor Glenn H. Curtis. This aircraft first flew on 1 July 1911. The following year, the first Marine Corps aviator reported for duty, launching Marine Corps Aviation. Nearly a century later, the Navy's newest aircraft, the P-8A Poseidon, flew for the first time on 25 April 2009. This book shares the vision of today's Naval Aviation leaders, extending the earliest plans for Naval Aviation from 1911 into the year 2032 and beyond. It underscores our focus on current readiness, the future capabilities and readiness necessary for the fleet of the future, and the people who form the cornerstone of all our successes. Naval Aviation is a warfighting force that is an integral p