When the Navy rebuilt an air arm in the 1950s it had nowhere to put it. The Directorate of Naval Aeronautics was re-created by law on 4 August 1952, and the air training centre that became CIAAN was set up by Decree 37,398 of 27 May 1955, headquartered in central Rio de Janeiro. Its first helicopters, Portuguese Wikipedia says, flew from a heliport at kilometre 11 of Avenida Brasil.

The arrival of the carrier Minas Gerais, commissioned on 6 December 1960 and in Brazil from 1961, needed a real airfield. The Navy’s own history of CIAAN dates its move to São Pedro da Aldeia to 23 November 1961; Portuguese Wikipedia’s article on the base gives 1962. The site, on the Araruama lagoon east of Rio and close to the ports of Arraial do Cabo and Cabo Frio, was chosen, in Wikipedia’s words, as a strategic location for an air base.

Portuguese Wikipedia dates the formal activation of the Base Aérea Naval to 1966 and the move of the Força Aeronaval’s command to the base to 1971, the year CIAAN also came under it. Since then the base has been the single home of Brazil’s naval squadrons, with only the four district helicopter squadrons stationed elsewhere, at Belém, Rio Grande, Ladário and Manaus.

The new base was the front line of a dispute that ran from the late 1950s to 1965: should the Navy or the Air Force fly the aircraft of the Minas Gerais? Throughout 1963, English Wikipedia says, the Navy took delivery of six Pilatus P-3 trainers for its 1st Instruction Air Squadron and six North American T-28 Trojans for a second fixed-wing unit, without the air force’s blessing.

On 12 June 1963 the newspaper Tribuna da Imprensa reported that a FAB aircraft had nearly been machine-gunned by the Navy while flying over the naval air base at São Pedro da Aldeia. President João Goulart suspended naval flying. In September the Navy Minister, Sílvio Mota, visited the base and was greeted by the “Revoada”, a mass take-off by naval aviators in protest; the flying ban ended. Portuguese Wikipedia’s article on the base places the incident and the Revoada in 1962, a year earlier; the dates here follow English Wikipedia, which cites the newspaper report.

The quarrel peaked in December 1964 at Tramandaí in Rio Grande do Sul, where air force soldiers fired at a Navy HU-1 helicopter to stop it taking off; the Minister of Aeronautics, Nelson Lavanère-Wanderley, resigned. Decree 55,627 of 26 January 1965 ended it: the Navy kept the carrier and its helicopters, the fixed-wing aircraft went to the FAB, and São Pedro da Aldeia became a helicopter base for the next 33 years.

Decree 2,538 of 8 April 1998 gave the Navy back its fixed-wing aircraft. The Navy’s VF-1 page records the purchase from Kuwait on 30 April 1998 of 20 single-seat A-4KU and three two-seat TA-4KU Skyhawks; they reached Porto do Forno at Arraial do Cabo by sea on 5 September 1998 and were moved to the base. The Navy had nine qualified pilots at first, trained with help from the Brazilian Air Force, the Argentine Navy and the US Navy.

The Skyhawks never had much of a deck. They flew from the Minas Gerais in 2000–01 and then from the São Paulo, which spent long periods under repair; English Wikipedia counts about 600 launches from her in all. Embraer was contracted on 14 April 2009 to modernise them, and Portuguese Wikipedia counts five AF-1B and two AF-1C delivered by April 2022.

The squadron’s worst day came on 26 July 2016, when an AF-1B went into the sea off Saquarema during attack training; its pilot was never found. The jets kept flying: Poder Naval reported VF-1 aircraft practising approaches on the USS George Washington in May 2024 and patrolling off Fernando de Noronha in May 2025. A US Navy image of 12 September 2022, published by Poder Naval in June 2026, shows others stored in the open on the base, and no successor has been chosen.

For most of its life the base has been a helicopter station. The anti-submarine squadron HS-1 flew Sea Kings from 1970; in 1996 the Minas Gerais sailed to Pensacola to collect six overhauled ex-US Navy SH-3Ds, redesignated SH-3B, plus two for spares, and they reached São Pedro da Aldeia in June 1996, according to Poder Naval. Sikorsky SH-16 Seahawks replaced them from 2012.

The base also took the Navy into unmanned flight. The 1st Remotely Piloted Aircraft Squadron, QE-1, was activated here on 5 July 2022 with six ScanEagles, after a first launch on 27 June. From 2025 HI-1 began to receive H125 (IH-18) trainers to replace its Jet Rangers, and a naval air maintenance group (GAerNavMan) was created at the base on 6 December 2019.