The first historical phase of Brazilian Naval Aviation runs from its foundation in 1916 until its extinction and absorption by the newly-created Brazilian Air Force in 1941. It was the air service of the Brazilian Navy, managed by the Navy's Directorate of Aeronautics and tasked with the air defense of the Brazilian coastline using seaplanes and land planes. Its aviators were trained at the Naval Aviation School, in the federal capital, and served at air bases in Galeão and in the states. During this period, no embarked aviation was established, and the fleet did not operate aircraft carriers or ships with catapults.

Its birth was part of a military modernization policy through the importation of new technologies, in a country still devoid of an aviation industry. In the midst of the First World War, Brazil was able to train a nucleus of aviators in the air services of the Allied powers, and back in Brazil, it received advisory support from the United States Navy. The Brazilian Army would create its own air service in 1919, but the two air arms had no administrative connection.

The first operations were coastal raids, which allowed aviators to train outside Rio de Janeiro and brought publicity to aviation, as well as real operations against the tenentist revolts of the 1920s. The main representative of aviators within the naval high command, Captain Protógenes Guimarães, was himself arrested in 1924 for tenentist conspiratorial activity, resulting in government neglect toward Naval Aviation until the Revolution of 1930. The Vargas Era brought renewed investments, larger-scale operations in the 1932 Constitutionalist Revolution, access to new destinations with the Naval Air Mail, licensed assembly of Focke-Wulf aircraft in Galeão, and the consolidation of careers and personnel within the Aviation Corps.

Naval aviators gradually set themselves apart from the rest of the Navy's officer corps. They were a well-trained technical body, though known for cases of indiscipline and flight accidents, and were interested in the European model of independent air forces. In 1941, Getúlio Vargas unified the Army and Navy air services into a third branch, the Brazilian Air Force. 156 officers, 267 petty officers and enlisted men, and 99 aircraft of 15 types belonging to Naval Aviation were absorbed by the new service. This was done against the will of the Navy's leadership, which would rebuild an air service beginning in 1952, leading to what would become known as the "embarked aviation issue".

Origins

The naval possibilities of dirigibles and airplanes, and the organization of an air service in the Brazilian Navy, were discussed for the first time in the Brazilian press in 1908. The establishment of a naval aviation arm was planned in the 1906–1910 naval expansion program, during the South American naval arms race. In the Revista Marítima Brasileira, in 1910, Lieutenant Captain Oscar Pacheco observed that aviation and torpedoes weakened the preponderance of battleships in naval warfare. Aerial exploration—flying over fortifications, ports, and distant coasts at altitudes high enough to avoid being hit—would reduce the element of surprise. In 1914, in the same journal, Corvette Captain M. C. de Gouveia Coutinho compared the role of "hydro-aviation" to that of cruisers and cavalry.

Only five years after Santos Dumont's pioneering flight, Navy officers became the first president of the Brazilian Aeroclub (Admiral José Carlos de Carvalho) and the first Brazilian military officer to earn a brevet (First Lieutenant Jorge Henrique Moller), in 1911. Moller had been sent to France along with an Army lieutenant, Ricardo Kirk, months before the first military use of airplanes in world history, during the Italo-Turkish War. Aeronautics was a cutting-edge industry, newly born in the industrial powers. It did not exist in Brazil, where all the machinery for the consumer industry was imported and there was no flight school whatsoever, but the subject moved journalists and those interested in national defense.

It was difficult to acquire aeronautical equipment, and specialized instructors and mechanics were scarce. When the private sector, in partnership with the Ministry of War, founded the Brazilian School of Aviation in 1914, the Navy assigned 25 officers to attend, but the school ceased operations within five months, without brevetting a single aviator. Another school, founded by the Public Force of São Paulo, met the same fate. The Navy then chose to train its own pilots and technical personnel. After some attempts at partnerships with private enterprise, contact was made with the American aircraft manufacturer Curtiss Aeroplane Company and with the French Avions Farman. The second option was frustrated by the First World War, which absorbed all French aeronautical production.

Naval Aviation School

The School of Submersibles and Aviation, created by order of the Ministry of the Navy on 22 August 1914, never left the drawing board. Financial constraints and the effects of the war delayed the establishment of the school by two years, until it materialized through Decree No. 12,167, of 23 August 1916, which created the Naval Aviation School (EAvN) and the Submersible School. The date of 23 August 1916 marks the beginning of Brazilian Naval Aviation and demonstrates the Navy's pioneering spirit. The Army would only establish its Military Aviation in 1919. Unlike earlier attempts, this time there was a presidential decree (signed by Venceslau Brás), a national security vision, and the provision of regulations. The first director was Corvette Captain Protógenes Guimarães. Operations began at the old Navy Arsenal, in Mauá Square, and before the end of the year were transferred to Enxadas Island, a temporary headquarters while facilities were planned for Rijo Island.

The first aircraft arrived on 25 June 1914, and the first flight took place on 8 August 1914. They were three Curtiss F seaplanes, Model 1914, with registrations C1, C2, and C3, along with spare parts and a Curtiss pilot-mechanic, Orthon Hoover, hired to assist with training and assembly. Funding came from a popular fund originally intended to raise the necessary sum for the battleship Riachuelo. As the goal was not met, the resulting money was used to purchase these aircraft. Another version is that they were paid for with the Navy Ministry's budget for food supplies. The founding decree simply stated that it occurred "without increase of expenditure".

The first three Brazilian naval aviators—First Lieutenants Raul Ferreira de Vianna Bandeira and Antônio Augusto Schorcht, and Second Lieutenant Victor de Carvalho e Silva—were breveted on 24 October 1916. In December, First Lieutenant Virgínius Brito de Lamare completed the course, rounding out the class. All had attended the Brazilian School of Aviation of 1914, except Schorcht. In April 1917, Hoover returned to the United States due to his country's entry into the war, leaving instruction to Lieutenants Schorcht and Lamare. President Venceslau Brás attended the brevetting of the first aerial observers on 2 April 1917, an occasion that is considered the first presidential flight in a Brazilian military aircraft. The first regulations of the EAvN were approved that same year. Among the students were some Army officers, as the Army did not yet have its own school. In August, the School was transferred to Rijo Island, where the facilities proved unsatisfactory. Operations returned to Enxadas Island in December 1917.

First World War experience

Brazil declared war on Germany in October 1917, joining the First World War on the side of the Allies. The Brazilian government participated in an Inter-Allied Conference in Paris, at which Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States agreed to train Brazilian naval aviators, on the condition that they would serve those countries in the war at the end of their training. The British, occupied with dozens of squadrons and struggling to replace pilots, were particularly interested in this arrangement. Brazilian Naval Aviation already had more aircraft than pilots and only sent volunteers.

Two officers and one petty officer trained with the United States Navy air service, where they flew in anti-submarine patrols in the North Atlantic. Six officers, four sergeants, and two corporals went to Italy, where they never saw combat. Eight officers (one of them from the Army) studied at the aviation schools of the Royal Navy and the British Army, arriving at the time when the British Royal Air Force (RAF) was being organized. One of them, Lieutenant Eugênio Possolo, died in a training accident. The rest were incorporated into RAF Squadrons 237 and 238, based near Plymouth, which flew anti-submarine patrols in the English Channel. At the end of the war, Brazil had a nucleus of aviators trained abroad, some with real combat experience, and received an American naval air instruction mission, led by Lieutenant Captains P. A. Cussachs and Jayme Oliver.

Government policy

First Brazilian Republic

Military aviation was introduced in Brazil amid debates on the modernization of the Armed Forces. The renewal was driven by the purchase of aircraft abroad, in the same way that capital ships had been acquired in previous years. One can speak of a "modernizing-consumerist ideology". Navy Minister Antônio Coutinho Gomes Pereira stated in the 1919 ministerial report that the air service was expensive but important. Alexandrino de Alencar, in the 1923 report, argued that aeronautics would be an efficient option for countries with few resources and extensive coastlines and borders. In 1920, Congress expanded the Navy's budget and included funds for Naval Aviation. The trend for the rest of the decade would be budget scarcity. The demands of Naval Aviation grew, but not the Navy's budget.

The leading figure of Naval Aviation in early 1920s Brazil was Captain Protógenes Guimarães, appointed Director of Naval Aeronautics when that office was created in 1923. Guimarães had family ties and close relations with Minister Alencar and was a well-known enthusiast of aviation. Politically, he was regarded as a trustworthy government loyalist since the first tenentist revolts in 1922, when he commanded the Naval Battalion. Even though he was not an aviator, Guimarães flew with his subordinates and championed their demands, gaining the sympathy of much of the pilot corps. In July 1924, he requested resignation from his office due to disagreements with Minister Alencar, who refused to extend to Navy pilots the same financial compensation given to their Army counterparts. The government employed aviation in operations against new tenentist revolts.

Switching sides, Guimarães led a conspiracy to rally the fleet and overthrow the Artur Bernardes government. The plot was uncovered by the police, and its leader was arrested in October 1924. Naval Aviation was punished: the Directorate of Aeronautics had its activities provisionally suspended from 26 November 1924 to 23 December 1925, and there were no enrollments at the Naval Aviation School for a year. The difficulties did not entirely halt its development: technological momentum outweighed internal resistance, to the point that in 1926 the Navy General Staff protested that "Naval Aviation has evolved in defiance of this NGS".

Special funds were released in early 1927 for the renewal of the air fleet. On the eve of the Revolution of 1930, the Washington Luís government made emergency purchases for Naval Aviation, but the orders would only arrive after his overthrow. At the time of the revolution that would bring Getúlio Vargas to power until 1945, Naval Aviation was disorganized and lacking in personnel and equipment. Command posts were occupied by officers with no aviation background, and the general mood was one of discouragement.

Vargas era