Millington Tennessee Naval Air Technical Training Center Patch

For half a century the road to a Navy flight line ran through Millington, Tennessee, about 20 miles north of Memphis and hundreds of miles from salt water. The Naval Air Technical Training Center moved its headquarters there from Pensacola in 1946, onto Naval Air Station Memphis. Its 21 schools trained Navy and Marine Corps aviation personnel in aircraft maintenance and operations. In 1971 the station became headquarters for all Navy technical training, overseeing 52 activities in 27 locations across the country. To generations of sailors and Marines headed for aviation jobs, it was simply NATTC Millington.

The ground was an airfield before the Navy came. It opened in 1917 as Park Field, an Army Signal Corps Aviation School training pilots for the Allies in World War I. The Navy arrived in 1942 with a Naval Reserve Aviation Base, which became NAS Memphis in 1943. The 1993 base realignment changed the station to Naval Support Activity Memphis in 1995 and Naval Support Activity Mid-South in 1998, and that year the remaining airfield training moved back to NAS Pensacola and the runway closed. In 1999 the airfield went to the Millington Municipal Airport Authority.

The patch is a blue triangle standing on its base, with a red-orange field inside a thin black line. At the top a blue torch carries a gold flame over a white classical temple of five columns on a stepped base, the old signs of a school. Below them a pair of gold wings spreads out from an anchor and shield, the mark of naval aviation. Across the bottom band NATTC MILLINGTON is stitched in gold between an anchor for the Navy and an eagle, globe and anchor for the Marine Corps, the two services the schools trained. It measures 4.5 by 4.5 inches with a cut edge and iron-on backing.

Millington was nobody's idea of a Navy town, and it did not need to be. It was where a young airman or Marine learned the systems he would spend his enlistment keeping in working order, and where the standard was set before he ever reported to a squadron. Graduates went from Millington to carriers, air stations and Marine squadrons all over the world, and the training went with them. Today the old station is Naval Support Activity Mid-South, but the people who passed through NATTC still call it Millington.

Put it in a shadow box with your squadron patches and your A-school class photo, or on a vest at a reunion. It is a good gift for a dad or granddad who still talks about his A-school in Tennessee. Every aviation career had a first classroom, and for a lot of them it was this one.