Assistant Secretary of the Navy (AIR)
civilian office of the US Navy
The Assistant Secretary of the Navy (AIR) was a civilian office of the United States Department of the Navy. The assistant secretary of the Navy (AIR) initially reported to the assistant secretary of the Navy and later to the under secretary of the Navy.
With the emergence of naval aviation as a major new military technique, the Navy had increasingly large organizations to oversee it. From 1910, there was an Officer in Charge of Aviation, then a Director of Naval Aeronautics, then in 1916 a Director of Naval Aviation. In 1921, Congress replaced those positions with a distinct Bureau of Aeronautics. Finally, on June 24, 1926, Congress created the position of Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Aeronautics to oversee the United States' naval aviation forces. The position was vacant from 1932 until 1941, and upon being re-occupied, the position was re-titled Assistant Secretary of the Navy (AIR) on September 11, 1941.
On February 6, 1959, the office was redesignated Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Research and Development). In April 1977, the name was changed to Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Research, Engineering and Systems).
The office was disestablished in 1990, when the office was merged with the office of Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Shipbuilding and Logistics) to create the new office of Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Research, Development and Acquisitions).
The public source identifies “Assistant Secretary of the Navy (AIR)” as civilian office of the US Navy. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Assistant, Secretary and Navy.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4809036. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1910, 1916, 1921 and 1926.
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This entry incorporates text from “Assistant Secretary of the Navy (AIR)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.