Naval Aircraft Factory

The Naval Aircraft Factory was an aircraft manufacturing plant owned and run by the United States Navy at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Secretary of the Navy approved its construction in July 1917, and the Navy established it in 1918 after the country entered the First World War. Army demand for aircraft had left private manufacturers uninterested in the Navy's much smaller orders, so the Navy decided to own a factory of its own to secure part of its supply, to gather cost data for its dealings with private builders, and to produce experimental designs under its direct control. It built flying boats such as the H-16 during that war, later concentrated on testing and evaluating aircraft and on parachutes, catapults and arresting gear, and returned to large-scale aircraft production in 1936. In 1942 it became the Naval Air Material Center, and it ended aircraft production when the Second World War ended in 1945.