On the afternoon of November 14, 1910, a self-taught Iowa civilian pilot named Eugene Ely rolled a Curtiss biplane down an 83-foot wooden ramp built across the bow of the cruiser USS Birmingham, anchored just off Old Point Comfort in Hampton Roads. His wheels hit the water on the way down. He kept flying. Every aircraft carrier in every navy in the world traces back to that ramp.
A Pirep featured story · KORF Norfolk International, Norfolk, VA
In October 1910, the Secretary of the Navy appointed Captain Washington Irving Chambers as a one-man naval aviation office to "observe everything that will be of use in the study of aviation and its influence upon the problems of naval warfare." He had no budget, no aircraft, and no pilots. He went to the Belmont Park air meet in New York to recruit. There he met Glenn Curtiss — the aircraft manufacturer — and a 24-year-old civilian pilot named Eugene Burton Ely, born in Williamsburg, Iowa, who had taught himself to fly seven months earlier after crashing the first plane he ever sat in.
Word reached Chambers that the Hamburg-American steamship line was about to attempt the first ship-to-shore aircraft flight from an ocean liner. He decided the U.S. Navy had to do it first. On November 9, 1910, naval constructor William McEntee began work at Norfolk Navy Yard on a temporary wooden flight deck — 83 feet long, 24 feet wide — bolted across the bow of the light cruiser USS Birmingham. The forward edge sloped five degrees downward and ended 37 feet above the water.
Ely arrived on November 13 with his Curtiss Model D Pusher — wings of spruce, ash, bamboo, and doped linen. On November 14, the Birmingham steamed out into Chesapeake Bay. Weather closed in: rain, fog, light wind. The plan had been to launch while underway to add wind over the deck. At 3:00 PM the ship was anchored a quarter-mile off Old Point Comfort. The weather looked like it was clearing. Ely climbed in, started the engine, and — without authorization, while the ship was still at anchor — opened the throttle. The Curtiss rolled down the 83-foot deck, lifted off the bow, dropped, hit the water with both wheels and the propeller, sprayed Ely with seawater and shredded wood, and somehow stayed in the air. He flew 2½ miles to Willoughby Spit and landed on the beach.
Two months later, on January 18, 1911, Ely landed a Curtiss Pusher on a wooden deck rigged across the stern of the armored cruiser USS Pennsylvania in San Francisco Bay, using a primitive tailhook to catch one of 22 sandbagged ropes laid across the deck — the first arrested landing in history. He died nine months after that, in a crash at the Georgia State Fair in Macon on October 19, 1911. He was 24. Congress posthumously awarded him the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1933.
Hampton Roads stayed where the Navy did aviation. Naval Station Norfolk — adjacent to KORF — is the largest naval base in the world. Five aircraft carriers home-port there. Naval Air Station Norfolk has an exhibit of retired naval aircraft that bears Eugene Ely's name. A granite marker on the Newport News waterfront looks out at the water where the Birmingham was anchored that day. Pilots into KORF fly over more naval aviation than exists anywhere else on earth, on a runway less than ten miles from the spot where it began.