He was one of the earliest United States Marine Corps aviators, one of the first persons to perform a loop in a seaplane, and a pioneer of stall and spin recovery techniques.

On February 13, 1917, he flew an N-9 over the Gulf of Mexico off Pensacola, Florida, and began attempts to loop it.

Lacking witnesses, he flew over Naval Air Station Pensacola and repeated the feat.

[4] The Marine Corps lacked any kind of ambulance aircraft in the 1920s and early 1930s, so Evans came up with a way of housing a stretcher and a medical attendant aboard a modified Douglas P2D-1 patrol floatplane, and the Marine Corps used the modified aircraft in support of its occupation duties in Haiti and Santo Domingo.

Their oldest son, Captain Francis T. Evans Jr., USAF, served in Europe during World War II as a United States Army Air Forces fighter pilot and later served in the United States Air Force.

He died on 16 June 1953 while attempting to land his disabled F-86 Sabre fighter at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, when he put the F-86 into a nosedive to avoid crashing into a playground full of children at Forestville Elementary School in Forestville, Maryland.