Brazilian Naval Aviation (1916–1941)

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".