Since 1910 the Royal Navy had taken an interest in aviation, when Eugene Ely's Curtiss biplane took to the air from USS Birmingham to become the world's first ship-launched aircraft. In trials with seaplanes and, eventually, carrier-borne landplanes, the RN and RNAS continually broke new ground in their search for the most effective union of air and sea forces. In this book, Terry Treadwell and Alan Wood detail this history from the earliest trials to the end of the FIrst World War. --book cover.