A naval air station for Corpus Christi had been proposed since the mid-1930s, and the city's
congressman,
Richard M. Kleberg, supported it. But it remained a low priority construction project for the
U.S. Navy as late as January 9, 1940. (The Kleberg family and
Roy Miller both supported
Vice President John Nance Garner's quest for the
1940 presidential nomination.) Rep.
Lyndon B. Johnson made himself a key Texas ally of
President Franklin D. Roosevelt's
bid for a third term, and the
White House told the Navy Department to consult Johnson, and heed his advice, on Navy contracts in Texas. By February 1940, the project was on the Navy's preferred list.
Brown & Root, a
Houston firm, shared the construction contract with another New Deal supporter,
Henry Kaiser; the president personally signed the (first)
cost plus fixed fee contract June 13, 1940. The Roosevelt campaign in Texas no longer had a shortage of cash. The official step leading to the construction of the Naval Air Station was initiated by the
75th United States Congress in 1938. A board found that a lack of training facilities capable of meeting an emergency demand for pilots constituted a grave situation. They recommended the establishment of a second air training station, and further, that it be located on
Corpus Christi Bay. NAS Corpus Christi was commissioned by its first Commanding Officer,
CAPT Alva Berhard, on March 12, 1941. The first flight training started on May 5, 1941.
North American SNJ-4s warming up for training at NAS Corpus Christi circa 1943. stationed at the Naval Air Station Corpus Christi boarding a
PBY Catalina, circa 1942 In 1941, 800 instructors provided training for more than 300 student pilots a month. The training rate nearly doubled after the
bombing of Pearl Harbor. By the end of
World War II, more than 35,000 naval aviators had earned their wings there. Corpus Christi provided intermediate flight training in World War II, training naval pilots to fly
SNJ,
SNV,
SNB,
OS2U,
PBY, and
N3N type airplanes. In 1944 it was the largest naval aviation training facility in the world. The facility covered , and had 997 hangars, shops, barracks, warehouses and other buildings. Future
President George H. W. Bush was the youngest pilot to receive his wings at NAS Corpus Christi in June 1943. NAS Corpus Christi also was home to the
Blue Angels from 1951 to 1954. It also served as a
Project Mercury Tracking station in the early 1960s.
2002 murder On June 27, 2002,
Alfred Bourgeois, a long-haul truck driver who often took his family with him on work trips, was making a delivery at NAS Corpus Christi. As he backed his truck into a loading dock, his 2-year-old daughter accidentally jostled her potty chair and tipped it over. Bourgeois then murdered his daughter after he slammed her head into the interior of his truck with force. He then left her, mortally injured, to carry on with his work. His daughter was found unresponsive by the side of his tractor-trailer. She died the following day and Bourgeois was charged with her murder. Because the murder occurred on a military base, which is classed as federal property, Bourgeois was tried in a federal court as opposed to a state court. In 2004, he was found guilty of her murder and was sentenced to death. In 2020, he was executed by the federal government.
2020 shooting On May 21, 2020, a motorist crashed through a northern perimeter gate at NAS Corpus Christi, activating vehicle barriers that stopped the vehicle. The driver then got out and opened fire before being shot and killed. A
Navy police officer was shot but was protected by a ballistic vest. Officials with the
FBI announced the incident was
terrorism-related and a second
person of interest may be at large. The shooter was later identified as
Adam Alsalhi, a 20-year-old Corpus Christi resident born in
Syria, who had expressed support for
ISIS and
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The incident was the second fatal shooting and the fourth security incident that caused NAS Corpus Christi to be locked down since February 2019. ==Current operations==