Marine Aircraft Group 42
military unit

Marine Aviation Training Support Group 42 (MATSG-42) is a United States Marine Corps Reserve aviation unit based at Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida. The mission of MATSG-42 is to provide Marine Corps reserve component augmentation in direct support of active component Navy and Marine Corps aviation activities in order to sustain required levels of qualified Naval Aviators, Naval Flight Officers, Naval Aircrewmen, and enlisted Marine Aviation aircraft maintenance personnel.
As Marine Aircraft Group 42 (MAG-42), it was previously based at the since BRAC'd Naval Air Station Atlanta, Georgia. Due to a re-organization within Marine aviation, MAG-42 was deactivated on 21 June 2008. It was redesignated and reactivated as MATSG-42 on or about 2011 aboard NAS Pensacola.
History
Marine Aircraft Group 42 (MAG-42) was initially commissioned on January 1, 1943, in Naval Air Station North Island, California, as Marine Base Defense Aircraft Group 42, 4th Marine Aircraft Wing. The unit's mission was to provide air defense support for west coast Naval and Marine Corps installations and to conduct airborne search and patrol, transportation, air-sea rescue, and shipping escort operations along the Pacific Coast. By 1944, the unit expanded from a small complement of Marines and two T-6 aircraft to 272 officers, 2,135 enlisted, and 102 SNJ aircraft.
During 1943, the Group became responsible for training Marine aviators for World War II combat operations in the Pacific Theater and relocated to Marine Corps Air Station Santa Barbara in March 1943. In November 1944, the unit was re-designated Marine Aircraft Group 42.
The public source identifies “Marine Aircraft Group 42” as military unit. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Marine, Aircraft and Group.
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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 Aug 19, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q17020244. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2008, 2011, 1943 and 1944.
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This entry incorporates text from “Marine Aircraft Group 42” 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.