by CDR Doug Seigfried, USN(Ret)
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| Opposite: “Wave It Off” is the signal to a CQTU-4 student flying an SNJ-6, spring ’49. Thousands trained in FCLP at Barin in the 1950s through 1974 flying the SNJ and T-28. |
The expansion of the Training Command in Pensacola led the Navy in early 1942 to search beyond the immediate “Mainside” area for yet another auxiliary field due to congestion from air traffic based at Chevalier, Saufley and Corry Fields, and other outlying fields. The most promising site, the Foley, Alabama, Municipal Airport, was found 32 miles west of NAS Pensacola. The Navy leased the airport and purchased an additional 640 acres to the east to build a new intermediate training facility. Construction began on 21 April 1942.
In September the new auxiliary air station was named for LT Louis T. Barin, Naval Aviator No. 56, a noted experimental and stunt pilot. Soon afterward, on 5 December 1942, the field was officially dedicated as a Naval auxiliary air station. The Barin Field complex consisted of two fields, East and West (the latter the original Foley Municipal Airport) with a common ramp, four hangars and base support facilities located between the two. Each field had four runways, the longest being just over 4,000 feet.
With the opening of Barin in December, VN-4D8 moved from Bronson Field, having been formed three months earlier to instruct flight students in the carrier plane advanced VF/VT syllabus. Soon after settling in, VN-6 was formed out of VN-4 in May 1943 for flight students who were to become torpedo pilots. VN-4 could now concentrate on training future fighter pilots. VN-6 was transferred three months later to Corry Field.
The principal trainer used at Barin during World War II was the North American SNJ. The land version of the OS2U was initially used for VT training until replaced by the SNJ. SNVs and N2S Stearmans also formed a small portion of the base’s air inventory that reached a peak of nearly 400 aircraft by spring 1944.
Beginning in mid-1942, intermediate CV students at NATC Corpus Christi and Pensacola were taught a core syllabus consisting of familiarization, navigation, aerobatics, night flying, instruments, basic tactics and fixed gunnery, followed by specialized instruction in fighter, torpedo or bombing specialties. VF training emphasized combat tactics and air-to-air gunnery while VT students practiced glide bombing, low-level overwater flights and group tactics. By spring 1944 a general CV syllabus replaced the specialized training, thus giving each student glide- and dive-bombing practice, as well as more tactics and air-to-air gunnery training.
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| VN-4 and VN-6 SNJs used to train intermediate CV students in the fighter and torpedo (VF/VT) syllabus line the ramp at NAAS Barin, late 1943. |
Barin was famous in other ways as well — it was isolated. Nine buses a day operated between Pensacola and other area training bases in addition to a slow train from Mobile that visited Foley once a day.
With the end of the war, Barin continued to train students in the SNJ. An influx of fleet pilots in 1945 and 1946 lead some instructors to perform prohibited or dangerous maneuvers in impromptu air shows, and bets were placed for spot landings or who could do a particular (and usually unauthorized) maneuver. LCDR Robert “Red” Poynter, USN (Ret.), who received his wings in April 1946, tells of his experiences at Barin.
“Flight safety was interesting during my training. While I was at Barin going through instruments and night flying, I lost my instructor to a flat-hatting accident. He had taken three of us cadets up on a night flight in SNJs when he told us to orbit a point and that he would be right back. After almost an hour we returned to Barin Field, scared that we would get in trouble for making a decision to return without our instructor. The tower told us to report immediately to the squadron, and after a tough grilling by the flight instructors, were told that our instructor was dead. He had flown over to Mobile to buzz his girlfriend’s hotel and had hit a church steeple, causing his SNJ to crash into the hotel. The pieces of the aircraft, with probably some of the instructor, were brought back to Barin and displayed next to the walkway leading from the cadet’s barracks to the flight line as a reminder to all hands not to flat-hat.”
Though NAAS Barin was officially deactivativated in January 1947, it continued service as an outlying practice field. Several attempts were made to reopen Barin for more complex operations, but the field was not reactivated until February 1952 when the Training Command’s basic and advanced Carrier Qualification Training Unit Four (CQTU-4) moved there from NAAS Corry Field. By June 1952 students were flying FCLP paddle passes in the training unit’s SNJs, AD-1s, F6F-5s, TBM-3Es and F8F-1s. A shift in the basic and advanced syllabus prompted the squadron’s redesignation to BTU-3 (carqual and gunnery SNJ) in mid-1953. By early 1955, the advanced CQ functions were discontinued.
In October 1956, BTU-3 was split into two training groups — BTG-4 and BTG-5 — due to a major revision of basic training. BTG-4 taught gunnery to VF/VA students in the SNJ and T-28, and radio instruments and navigation to VS/VP students in the SNB. Both groups next proceeded to BTG-5 for carqual training in the SNJ and T-28. In mid-1957 the new mirror carrier landing system was installed at Barin Field with the first basic prop students using the new system qualifying on USS Antietam (CVS-36) in November. Paddles passes continued to be taught to both basic prop and jet students until the end of 1959.
On 1 November 1958 NAAS Barin was again disestablished due to a reduction in flight students and the base’s inability to handle jet trainers that were entering the basic training program. Despite the termination of large-scale training activities, East Field continued to be used for FCLP by T-28 CQ training units BTG-5 (later redesignated VT-5) based at NAS Saufley Field until basic prop CQ was discontinued in 1974.
The author remembers flying to Barin from Saufley with a flight of T-28s in the early morning hours for two FCLP periods daily from mid-June to mid-July 1962. It was hard, hot work to fly at precisely 350 feet, constantly adding and taking off power while flying through the thermals and sink holes caused by the landscape that ranged from skinny pines to pastures and plowed fields.
Briefings at Barin were held in a beat-up firehouse equipped with a blackboard and well-used BOQ furniture. After a thorough brief, students manned their T-28s and raced each other to the active to enter the FCLP pattern. At the end of the day, some of the students would take the long bus ride back to Saufley while the lucky ones would fly the T-28s in tight formation back to home field. Saufley tower would clear the T-34s from the pattern as VT-5 students entered the pattern to show the “Teeny Weeny” drivers what real aviators looked liked in the break.
The Navy sold the base facilities in 1962 to a private buyer. West Field, the original municipal landing facility, was returned to the city of Foley and is essentially unused today. Saufley Field closed in 1976 and Barin’s East Field reverted to an outlying field for Whiting T-34C Super Mentors. The Navy refurbished a hangar and building in 1988 to house a permanent crash crew detachment. Barin Field is still used today as an OLF and is considered capable for use in the future by the new JPATS T-6A Texan II.
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| A 1998 view of Barin Field from the northwest shows the abandoned West Field and associated buildings (foreground) and a refurbished hangar between the two fields. The East Field continues to be used as an OLF for NAS Whiting Field. |