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    Virginia Aviation
    Virginia Aviation
    Virginia Aviation
    Ebook185 pages36 minutes

    Virginia Aviation

    By Roger Connor

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Virginia has one of the oldest and richest aeronautical legacies in the country. Beginning with the use of balloons in the Civil War, the commonwealth was at the forefront of aerospace innovation, particularly in military aviation. Langley Field and Quantico were key development centers in the maturation of aerial warfare for the Army Air Service, its successors, and the Marine Corps. Norfolk witnessed the birth of the American carrier force and was on the front line in the Battle of the Atlantic. The state is also home to a legacy of civil and commercial activity. The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) laboratory at Langley Field established numerous foundational principles of modern aerodynamics, supported the development of many of the most significant aircraft of the 20th century, and paved the way for travel beyond Earth. Commercial airfields, including Richmond, Roanoke, and Washington s Hoover and National, were at the cutting edge of modern air travel and played host to aviation s elite. These images from local, state, and national archives nearly all previously unpublished depict a rich technological heritage.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateNov 3, 2014
    ISBN9781439648261
    Virginia Aviation
    Author

    Roger Connor

    Roger Connor curates several aeronautical collections for the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. He is an experienced aviator with 4,000 hours logged as a flight instructor and commercial pilot.

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      Book preview

      Virginia Aviation - Roger Connor

      it.

      INTRODUCTION

      This is the story of a state and its people undergoing one of the most remarkable technological transformations in recorded history. The 100 years between 1861 and 1961 were witness to amazing achievements that ranged from the deployment of balloons in the Civil War to the advent of manned spaceflight. They represent profound revolutions in transportation, communication, and warfare—and Virginia had a ringside seat.

      North Carolina lays claim to the tagline First in Flight, while Ohio does the same with Birthplace of Aviation—both for their mutual association with the Wright brothers. Likewise, California has long been the heart of the American aerospace industry, and most other states can make significant claims to shaping the nation’s aeronautical heritage. However, no state can claim a richer and more diverse aerospace history than Virginia. From the first balloon flight in the commonwealth in 1801 (near Williamsburg) to satellites launched from Wallops Island, the state has witnessed an astounding number of transformative milestones in civil and military aviation. However, like much of Virginia’s history, the military component of the commonwealth’s aeronautical legacy merits special distinction relative to other states.

      Geographically, there are many reasons for Virginia’s aeronautical prominence. The sheltered waters and ocean access of Hampton Roads have made Norfolk and the Tidewater region a cornerstone of national defense for the East Coast. The Army’s Langley Field and the Navy’s Naval Air Station Norfolk quickly assumed responsibility for defending the Mid-Atlantic region in the middle decades of the 20th century, rendering the grand coastal fortifications at Fort Monroe obsolete. Northern Virginia provided demonstration and landing fields for Washington, DC, while the spacious grounds of nearby Quantico served as a laboratory for the exotic new aerial technologies of the Marine Corps.

      The Civil War marked the first American experience with aeronautics in warfare—one that occurred almost entirely within the confines of the commonwealth. Union balloonist Thaddeus S.C. Lowe’s demonstrations captured the imagination of President Lincoln, leading to the establishment of a small balloon corps, as well as prompting a competing Confederate balloon program. However, the realities of operations in the Peninsula Campaign did not decisively demonstrate the military value of aerial observation to the degree that Lowe might have liked, and he disbanded the Balloon Corps in 1863, while the Confederate balloon was captured in 1862.

      American military interest in aeronautics did not reemerge in a substantive way until the first decade of the 20th century, when the Army Signal Corps began evaluating a series of new technologies for observation, including balloons, Thomas Scott Baldwin’s airship, and the Wright brothers’ airplane. The Signal Corps’ demonstration ground for these new technologies was Fort Myer in Arlington. The Wright brothers’ demonstrations of 1908–1909 were successful in convincing the military of the airplane’s potential, but they also showcased the risks, as Lt. Thomas Selfridge became the first casualty of powered heavier-than-air flight in 1908.

      Glenn Curtiss, the Wright’s chief competitor, also found Virginia to be an exemplary proving ground. With Thomas Scott Baldwin, he established a factory and one of the nation’s first flight schools in Hampton Roads—the Atlantic Coast Aeronautical Station. As America entered into World War I, the Aviation Section, Signal Corps (forerunner of today’s Air Force) discovered an ideal test site at the location of several old plantations near Hampton. The National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics (NACA, the forerunner of NASA) piggybacked on the construction to establish one of its principal aeronautical laboratories. Across the waters of Hampton Roads, the Navy began aircraft operations at a new site, known as Naval Air Station Hampton Roads (soon to become Naval Air Station Norfolk).

      Though American participation in World War I was brief, the aeronautical facilities of the Tidewater had an outsized impact on the region and, more broadly, on aeronautics. Many of the aerospace innovations of the last century may be connected in some way to the highly significant aerodynamic research undertaken there. Most American combat aircraft through the World War II era were validated in part by testing at Langley, as were many civil and commercial aircraft. The space age also had its dawn at Langley and on Wallops Island, where the early space capsules underwent aerodynamic and atmospheric testing and Americans prepared to land on the Moon.

      One of the most significant aeronautical events of the early postwar years occurred at Langley Field in 1921 when Brig. Gen. William Mitchell attempted to persuade his superiors, and the country at large, that the bomber had made the battleship obsolete and that only airpower could be decisive in future wars. His aircraft bombed a fleet of captured German and obsolete American warships anchored in the Virginia Capes off the mouth of the Chesapeake. Though the experiment was more like shooting the proverbial fish in a barrel, Mitchell’s experiments provoked a debate in the American military that ultimately had profound implications for the way the nation fights its wars. During the interwar years, the Marine Corps also established its own center of innovation at Quantico, where it could develop new aerial tactics. This paid off significantly in the Cold War, when the concept of using helicopters for air mobility was fleshed out with the aircraft of squadron HMX-1 that would eventually become synonymous with transporting the president by helicopter.

      The attempts by Germany’s U-boat force to sever the seagoing lifeline between the United Kingdom and the United States during the Battle of the Atlantic in 1942–1943 placed Langley Field and Naval Air Station Norfolk on the front lines of combat operations. Norfolk also served as the birthplace of America’s carrier force, as home to the first shipboard flight of an airplane in 1910 by Eugene Ely, as well as the construction of the USS Langley (CV-1), the Navy’s first carrier.

      The Cold War brought new threats and new opportunities. Jet aircraft required larger facilities, ultimately culminating in Dulles Airport, which substantially shaped the built landscape of Northern Virginia. More ominous infrastructure appeared in the commonwealth as well, with nuclear-tipped antiaircraft missile batteries proliferating in Northern Virginia to defend the nation’s capital against Soviet bomber formations.

      Virginia was also an ideal way station on the emerging aerial highways connecting north and south on the eastern seaboard. Washington and Richmond quickly grew as aviation terminals, first

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