The aviation story at North Island began in 1911 when Glenn Curtiss established his flying school on the flat land at the island's northern end. The Army and Navy both sent students to train there in those early years, recognizing that Curtiss had found an ideal environment for instruction — calm air, open space, and a forgiving landscape for the inevitable accidents that accompanied early aviation.

The Army formalized its presence when it established Rockwell Field in 1917, naming it for Lieutenant Lewis C. Rockwell, an Army aviator who had died in a 1912 crash at the College Park aviation facility in Maryland. The name attached to a place that would, in the following decade, accumulate one of the most remarkable records of aviation achievement in American history.

On June 27, 1923, two Airco DH.4 aircraft accomplished the first successful aerial refueling in history over Rockwell Field. The procedure — transferring fuel from one aircraft to another while both were in flight — was experimental, dangerous, and immediately recognized as transformative. Aircraft that could refuel in flight were not constrained by their fuel tanks; the implications for long-distance flight were obvious.

That same year, two Army Air Service pilots completed the first non-stop transcontinental flight from New York to Rockwell Field — arriving at the same installation where aerial refueling had been demonstrated to make such flights possible. The connection between the two achievements was not accidental; Rockwell Field was where the Army was working out the practical problems of long-distance aviation.

Charles Lindbergh was deeply connected to San Diego. The Spirit of St. Louis was built at Ryan Airlines in San Diego; Lindbergh was involved in the design process and tested the aircraft in San Diego before his historic flight. When he departed for New York on May 10, 1927, Rockwell Field was his launch point.

His flight to New York was itself a record — he covered the distance in 21 hours and 40 minutes, at the time the fastest transcontinental flight on record. Ten days later, he departed Roosevelt Field on Long Island and arrived in Paris 33 hours and 30 minutes later. The transatlantic crossing that defined his legacy had its western origin at Rockwell Field, on the same ground where aerial refueling had been invented and where the Army Air Service was writing the rules of long-distance flight.

Among the many aviators who trained at Rockwell Field was James Doolittle, who would go on to lead the April 1942 raid on Tokyo — the first American air attack on the Japanese home islands, launched from the carrier USS Hornet in the Pacific, using B-25 bombers modified to take off from a carrier deck. The raid was strategically modest but psychologically enormous, demonstrating to both Japan and the American public that the Pacific War was not a one-way affair.

Doolittle's time at Rockwell Field was part of the foundation of his aviation expertise — the place where he learned what aircraft could do and what could be demanded of pilots who knew their machines thoroughly. Today the site is part of Naval Air Station North Island, the Navy having absorbed the Army's Rockwell Field during the reorganization of American military aviation. The flat land where Curtiss taught flying and Lindbergh departed for Paris is now one of the Navy's most important West Coast aviation installations.