Aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss established a flying school on North Island in 1911, recognizing in the flat land and calm air a nearly ideal training environment for the primitive aircraft of the era. The Navy sent its first aviator, Lieutenant Theodore Ellyson, to train here that same year — Ellyson became Naval Aviator Number One, the beginning of a lineage that would eventually encompass hundreds of thousands of naval aviators.

Curtiss also trained the first Japanese aviators at North Island in those early years, an early and somewhat ironic chapter in the history of American-Japanese aviation relations. The trainees he sent home with their credentials could not have known what the following three decades would bring, or that the naval aviation they were learning would eventually bring American and Japanese aircraft into violent conflict across the Pacific.

The firsts accumulated at North Island with remarkable speed through the 1910s and 1920s. In 1914, a young woman named Tiny Broadwick made the first parachute jump in the San Diego area from an aircraft over North Island — demonstrating a technology that would eventually save thousands of aviators' lives.

In 1923, two Army Air Service planes completed the first transcontinental non-stop flight by refueling in the air — a procedure that required developing new techniques for aerial refueling that had never been attempted at scale. That same year, the first mid-air refueling was achieved over North Island, proving that aircraft did not have to be tied to the range of their fuel tanks.

Jimmy Doolittle, who would later lead the famous 1942 raid on Tokyo, trained at North Island. The techniques and the culture of experimental military aviation that the base embodied shaped his approach to what was possible.

On May 10, 1927, Charles Lindbergh took off from North Island in his Spirit of St. Louis, beginning the multi-leg journey that would end in his solo transatlantic flight to Paris. North Island was his departure point from the West Coast; he flew to New York, and then, on May 20, 1927, he flew from Roosevelt Field on Long Island to Le Bourget airfield outside Paris in 33 hours and 30 minutes.

The connection between North Island and one of the most celebrated flights in history is often overlooked in accounts that focus on New York as the departure point. But Lindbergh's journey began here, on the same ground where naval aviation had been born sixteen years earlier, and his relationship with San Diego — where the Spirit of St. Louis was designed and built at Ryan Airlines — was deep and specific.

Among the many human stories that passed through North Island, one stands out for its unexpected historical resonance. When the base's first commanding officer arrived in 1917, his wife was a young woman named Wallis Warfield — later known, after her marriage to King Edward VIII forced his abdication in 1936, as Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor. She spent time at North Island as the wife of a naval officer before the life that would make her famous.

The base where naval aviation was born also happened to be, briefly, the home of the woman whose romance with a king would reshape the British monarchy. History collects these coincidences at places that matter enough to attract consequential people.