The airfield is named for Captain Washington Irving Chambers, an Annapolis graduate who did more than almost anyone else to convince the prewar Navy that aircraft would matter at sea. He arranged the first takeoff of an airplane from a U.S. Navy ship - a Curtiss pusher flown off USS Birmingham by civilian Eugene Ely on November 14, 1910 - and the first landing on one, also by Ely, on USS Pennsylvania two months later. Chambers wrote the recommendations that led Congress to fund naval aviation in 1911. He never flew himself; he died in 1934. The airfield was named for him in recognition of work that was largely bureaucratic and almost entirely successful.

By the summer of 1940, the station employed about 8,000 personnel, more than at any time since the end of World War I. Captain Patrick Bellinger, who had been the station's commanding officer twenty years earlier, returned to oversee its expansion. He insisted on permanent structures wherever possible because the temporary hangars and shops left from World War I were unsafe and expensive to maintain. Congress authorized the repurchase of about 1,000 acres of land east of the original station that the Army had sold off in the 1920s. A $72 million contract went to the Virginia Engineering Company of Newport News in June 1940. Hangars, three new runways, magazine areas, barracks, and seaplane ramps went up. The construction cut Mason Creek Road, so the Navy compensated the city by improving what is now Admiral Taussig Boulevard. Before the expansion, the field had no formal traffic control system - a white placard inserted through a slot in the roof of the operations building indicated which direction the runway was being used.

The Assembly and Repair Department - the depot that overhauled engines and airframes for the entire Atlantic Fleet - is a measure of how the war changed Norfolk. In 1939 the department occupied four old World War I hangars and employed 213 enlisted men and 573 civilians. By war's end it had grown to 3,561 civilians and 4,852 military workers running two ten-hour shifts a day, seven days a week. The civilian workforce included thousands of women. Before the war, women at the station had been hired only as seamstresses sewing wing and fuselage fabric. By 1942, with labor shortages forcing every door open, they were running machine shops, rebuilding engines, and stripping fuselages alongside men. From 1943 to the end of the war, 326 U.S. naval aviation units were commissioned and trained under the control of AIRLANT, the Atlantic Fleet's air component, headquartered here.

In 1968, the Naval Air Station took on a new responsibility - it became Recovery Control Center Atlantic for NASA's Apollo program. Apollo 7, the first crewed Apollo mission, splashed down in the Atlantic on October 22, 1968. The ships and aircraft that picked up the crew of Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walter Cunningham were directed from Chambers Field. The station had also served as a refuge during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when families were evacuated from Guantanamo Bay, and again during Operation Sincere Welcome in 1994, when 2,000 dependents and civilian workers were evacuated from Guantanamo. The base has a habit of becoming the destination when other places become impossible.

The Naval Aviation Depot at Norfolk, which had grown out of that wartime Assembly and Repair Department, closed on September 25, 1996 - the BRAC commission had recommended closure in 1993, and it took three years to wind down - ending decades of overhauling Grumman F-14 Tomcats and A-6 Intruders. Then in 1998 the Navy began "regionalization" - the consolidation of separate Hampton Roads commands to cut overhead. The biggest piece was the merger of Naval Station Norfolk with the adjacent Naval Air Station, which became official on February 5, 1999. The runways and ramps became NS Norfolk (Chambers Field), and the air operations folded into the larger naval station's Air Department. The last placeholder command, NAS Oceana Detachment Norfolk, was disestablished in 2012. What flies from the field today is mostly helicopters - the Helicopter Sea Combat squadrons of Wing Atlantic - along with C-9 transports and the regular shuttle traffic that keeps a base of 75,000 personnel and dozens of warships supplied.