Ellyson, Theodore Gordon, 1885-1928

Theodore Gordon Ellyson (1885-1928) was the first Navy officer to qualify as an airplane pilot. Born on February 27, 1885 in Richmond, Virginia, Ellyson entered the United States Naval Academy in 1901 and graduated with the class of 1905. In December 1910, Ellyson was ordered to Los Angeles, California to take flight lessons offered to the Navy by Glenn Curtiss, a pioneering aviator who had offered to train a pilot for the Navy free of charge. From the time Ellyson began instruction in aviation in January 1911, until April 29, 1913, he devoted all of his time to active flying and experimental work in aviation. In June 1918 Lieutenant Ellyson arrived England for duty with a Submarine Chaser Squadron at US Naval Base #27, at Plymouth, England. For his war service he was awarded the Navy Cross and cited: “For distinguished service in the line of his profession as Assistant for Operations to the Commander, Submarine Chaser Detachment ONE. He was largely responsible for the development of successful submarine-chaser tactics and doctrine.” On October 21, 2021 Commander Ellyson became the first Head of the Plans Division of the Department of the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics. He remained in that assignment until December 1922, when he became the Aviation Member of the US Naval Mission to Brazil, cooperating in the reorganization of the Brazilian Navy. He returned to the Bureau of Aeronautics in May 1925. Commander Ellyson was killed on February 27, 1928, his forty-third birthday, in a crash of an airplane in lower Chesapeake Bay, while on a night flight from Norfolk, Virginia, to Annapolis, Maryland.