On January 26, 1911, a flying machine ran across the water of Spanish Bight, the shallow inlet of San Diego Bay that lay between North Island and Coronado, and lifted into the air. Glenn Curtiss was at the controls. Nobody had yet flown a seaplane successfully from the waters of San Diego Bay. When he came back down onto the bight, he had done it, and the little camp he had built on the sand that winter turned into the start of something much larger.
North Island in the winter of 1910 to 1911 was a long way from the island a sailor sees today. It was an empty sand spit at the mouth of the bay, flat and open, with nothing on it worth guarding. The Coronado Beach Company owned it, and Curtiss leased ground there for a flying camp.
He chose it for the room it gave him. An aviator in those years needed open ground to take off and land, and North Island offered plenty with nobody in the way. It also had the bay alongside. Curtiss wanted that water, because the machine he meant to prove would rise from the sea.
The camp held the ordinary gear of early flying: aircraft, tools, spare parts and the men who kept them running. Through that winter Curtiss worked on a question that sounds simple now. Could an airplane take off from water and land on it again, reliably enough to matter?
The answer came on January 26. The flight from Spanish Bight was the first successful seaplane flight from the bay, and it changed what an airplane could be used for. A land plane needed a field. A seaplane needed only calm water, and a navy had calm water wherever its ships could anchor.
That was the point Curtiss meant to make to the Navy. One successful flight showed the machine could work. He still had to show that it could work alongside a warship.
On February 17, 1911, the armored cruiser USS Pennsylvania lay at anchor in San Diego Bay. Curtiss took off in his seaplane and flew out to her. He set down on the water beside the cruiser, and the aircraft was hoisted aboard the ship. Then it was lowered back to the water.
Set beside the long history of warships the event looks small: a light aircraft, a cruiser at anchor, a lift up and a lift down. What it proved was large. An aircraft and a ship could work together. A warship could carry an airplane, put it on the water and take it back. Every carrier that later sailed from this bay rests on that idea.
The demonstration answered a practical question the Navy had to settle before it would spend money on aviation. Aircraft were fragile and short-ranged in 1911. If they could only fly from a field ashore, their use at sea would be limited. If ships could handle them, the fleet could carry its own eyes over the horizon.
Curtiss did more that winter than fly. He also taught. Among the men at his North Island camp was Lieutenant Theodore G. Ellyson of the U.S. Navy, and Curtiss trained him to fly. Ellyson became the Navy's first aviator.
That small fact carries a lot of weight. The Navy's long line of pilots, from the first wood-and-fabric seaplanes to the jets that fly off carriers today, begins with one officer learning from a civilian on a leased stretch of San Diego sand. The service did not invent naval aviation in a laboratory or a staff office. It sent a lieutenant to a flying camp on the bay.
The flying camp did not stay a camp. North Island became a permanent home for military flying, and in 1917 the Navy commissioned Naval Air Station North Island. Because of that first winter, with the flight off Spanish Bight, the visit to the Pennsylvania and the training of Ellyson, North Island is called the birthplace of naval aviation.
The title fits the sequence of events. A seaplane first rose from these waters. An aircraft first showed here that it could operate with a ship. The Navy's first aviator learned to fly here. It all happened within a few months, on a spit of sand most people of the time would have passed by without a second look.
Sail in past Point Loma and Ballast Point today and North Island fills the view to the east, no longer an empty spit. Its long piers hold the carriers, the descendants of that cruiser and that seaplane, and aircraft still come and go above the station. From the deck of JADA, a 65-foot wooden yacht launched in 1938, you can look across the same water Curtiss used as his runway and see what his winter on the sand became. The story is one of many told on a San Diego Bay history sail, with the island itself in plain sight.
Sources: Naval History and Heritage Command; Naval Air Station North Island history; San Diego History Center; Wikipedia articles "Glenn Curtiss", "Naval Air Station North Island", "Theodore G. Ellyson" and "USS Pennsylvania (ACR-4)".
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