In January 1911 Glenn Curtiss signed a three-year contract with the owner of North Island, then an empty sandbar off Coronado, and opened a flying school there in February. In December 1910 Captain Washington Irving Chambers had ordered Lieutenant Theodore Ellyson to North Island to learn to fly under Curtiss. On 28 January 1911 Ellyson made an unintended first flight in a "grass cutter", cracking the aircraft but not himself; in February he became the first passenger in a floatplane, and took part in the trial in which Curtiss’s hydroaeroplane was hoisted aboard the cruiser USS Pennsylvania and lowered back to the water.

Ellyson went on to become Naval Aviator No. 1, qualifying in September 1911. The Curtiss school also trained others: Wikipedia records that it taught the first Japanese aviators in 1911, among them a Lieutenant Yamada and Chikuhei Nakajima, later founder of the Nakajima aircraft company. The Navy opened its first aviation station on the island in 1912, and the Army’s Signal Corps aviation school followed.

For two decades North Island was split. The Army named its side Rockwell Field on 20 July 1917; the Navy took up its first occupancy on 8 September 1917 and commissioned its side as a naval air station that year, starting as a tent camp. Congress authorised the purchase of the island in July 1919 for $6,098,333.

Some of the great flights of the 1920s were Army flights from Rockwell Field. On 27 June 1923 Captain Lowell Smith and Lieutenants John Richter, Virgil Hine and Frank Seifert flew the first complete air-to-air refuelling; the first non-stop transcontinental flight ended there in May 1923; and on 10 May 1927 Charles Lindbergh took off in the Spirit of St. Louis on the first leg of his journey to Paris. President Roosevelt ordered the field handed to the Navy in October 1935, and the transfer was completed on 31 January 1939.

In the Second World War North Island was a main supply and training base for the Pacific, and in 1945 the shallow Spanish Bight that separated it from Coronado was filled in, joining the two. In 1963 the House Armed Services Committee settled the argument with Pensacola, at least on paper, by naming North Island the Birthplace of Naval Aviation; Pensacola keeps the title of cradle.

Since 1997 the station has been part of Naval Base Coronado, a group of eight installations covering more than 57,000 acres. It is the headquarters of Commander, Naval Air Forces, the type commander for all naval aviation, and of Fleet Readiness Center Southwest, the depot that overhauls the Pacific Fleet’s aircraft. Carriers berth at its piers, and Wikipedia says that with all ships in port nearly 35,000 people are on the station. Its flying is dominated by helicopters — MH-60S and MH-60R squadrons — and by the CMV-22B Ospreys that have replaced the C-2A in carrier delivery.

North Island collects firsts the way Pensacola collects graduates. Wikipedia lists the first seaplane flight in 1911, the first air-to-air refuelling and the first non-stop flight across the United States, both in 1923; the transcontinental flight ended at Rockwell Field in May 1923. In the first week of 1929 the Army’s Question Mark endurance flight was supported by tankers flying from the same field.

The island also produced a forerunner of the Blue Angels. From 1928 a Navy formation team called the Sea Hawks flew demonstrations from North Island, eighteen years before Admiral Nimitz ordered the Navy’s official flight demonstration squadron formed in 1946. And it trained foreigners early: Curtiss’s 1911 school taught the first Japanese aviators, among them Chikuhei Nakajima, later the founder of the Nakajima aircraft company.