NAS Patuxent River, A History VOL 1

Located in Southern Maryland is a Navy complex comprising two main sites: Naval Air Station Patuxent River and its ancillary facility, Webster Outlying Field. For over 80 years, unproven aircraft, systems, and weapons intended for the Navy or Marine Corps have been exhaustively evaluated at Pax River. The base has become the lead site for the development, acquisition, testing, and support of all US naval aviation systems and equipment. In that capacity, Pax River hosts the Naval Air Systems Command, the US Naval Test Pilot School, a half-dozen Navy Test and Evaluation squadrons, and numerous subsidiary organizations.

But not a single operational fleet squadron is headquartered at Pax River.

This wasn’t always the case.

In fact, over the decades that followed its 1943 commissioning, Pax River hosted operational fleet squadrons with missions ranging from land-based air transportation to electronic intelligence gathering to nuclear strike. The base also housed earth science research squadrons that explored everything from hurricanes to polar ice fields to the planet’s magnetosphere.

Although they’ve now been largely forgotten, Pax River’s operational and earth science squadrons contributed directly to the nation’s defense in a World War, in Asian and Middle Eastern wars, and in a sometimes-hot Cold War. Those squadrons’ contributions are the subject of this book, the first volume in a series will cover various facets of Pax River’s remarkable story. subsequent volumes, which will cover testing at Pax River, are coming soon!