The key to the battle group is the aircraft carrier. The aircraft carrier is the largest and most versatile member of the battle group. The mission of the Navy is to maintain, train, and equip combat-ready naval forces capable of winning wars, deterring aggression, and maintaining freedom of the seas (U.S. Navy, www.
navy.mil).The fusion of aircraft technologies into a weapons system revolutionized naval warfare. They did so during a period little longer than a single human lifespan. This study tackles the subject of innovation and naval air power by approaching the issue at three levels: the institutional level, the organizational level, and the individual level.
This conceptual framework lay out both how and why American and British navies diverged in the development of carrier aviation. At the organizational level, the work examines the organizations involved in the development of naval aviation, ranging from naval bureaus and schools to government agencies, political parties, and interest groups. Institutionally, the study examines the “rules” that governed behavior, ranging from formal contracts, regulations, and laws to informal codes of behavior.The work analyzes the development of carrier aviation in the U.S. Navy before turning to an examination of the Royal Navy.
The Royal Navy had been the only navy to actually operate carriers in the First World War. At the conclusion of that war, the Royal Navy was far in advance of any other navy in both operational experience and construction design, and both the U.S. Navy and the Japanese Imperial Navy recognized the Royal Navy's lead in carrier aviation.The paper provides an excellent comparative summary of how individuals, organizations, and institutions in the United States and Great Britain interacted to create a more or less favorable environment for the development of carrier aviation during the interwar years. Far from being merely a matter of “vision,” the work contends that innovation depends on having both organizations and procedures in place that turn ideas into programs and then realistically test the products of those programs.
Upon U.S. entry into the war, the U.S.
Navy's air strength consisted of 48 officers, 239 enlisted men, 54 training planes, a couple of balloons, one dirigible, and a naval air station at Pensacola, Florida (Marriott 1985).Six years earlier, the Navy acquired its first aircraft and began training pilots. It was not until 1916, however, that the Naval Appropriations Act provided about four million dollars for the Navy's first flying corps. Aircraft manufacturing - helped considerably by the invention of the Tiemann Dry Kiln - gave companies a rapid supply of spruce wood to build aircraft frames, with most of the orders coming from abroad.Originally, the Naval Aircraft Factory was slated to build only training planes, but enough trainers were already being produced by other plants. What was desperately needed were types of aircraft suitable for antisubmarine patrol and convoy escort duty.
Therefore, the factory began manufacturing a newly designed plane that met the navy's requirements for this kind of service - the Curtiss H-16 twin-engine flying boat. The first two H-16s were built and successfully tested in late March 1918. They were sent to England as part of a fifty-plane contract. The last H-16 was delivered to the British four months later.In late May 1917, the first detachment of U.
S. naval personnel, under Commander Kenneth Whiting and consisting of six officers and sixty- three enlisted men, arrived in England.Then, on 16 September, the Navy Department authorized the establishment of fifteen naval air stations abroad. Four bases were opened in Ireland, with headquarters at Queenstown, and another at Killingholme on the English east coast.
Other stations were soon operational in France at Dunkirk and Le Croisic. A station was also established on the Adriatic Sea at Porto Corsini, Italy.
