The 479 FTG is a tenant activity at NAS Pensacola and a GSU of the 12th Flying Training Wing (12 FTW) at Randolph AFB, Texas.

In 1559, Spanish explorer Don Tristan de Luna founded a colony on Santa Rosa Island, considered the first European settlement of the Pensacola area.

After Great Britain defeated the French in the Seven Years' War and exchanging some territory with Spain, British colonists took over this site and West Florida in 1763.

Navy captains William Bainbridge, Lewis Warrington, and James Biddle selected the site on Pensacola Bay.

Pensacola would later become one of the best equipped naval stations in the country, but the early navy yard was beset with recruitment and labor problems.

Captain Melancthon Taylor Woolsey was able to make sufficient adjustments to the workday that the men returned to work after a couple of days.

His account covers the period of March to November 1828 and details the 66 sailors and marines admitted, their names and rank, diagnosis or the nature of their injury, and the date of their discharge or death.

"[7] Despite heroic efforts by the medical community, yellow fever would revisit the navy yard intermittently, e.g. in 1835, 1874, 1882, etc., the disease only coming under control with the work of Major Walter Reed in 1901.

[citation needed] From its foundation until the Civil War, enslaved labor was extensively utilized at Pensacola Navy Yard.

[12] To allay slaveholder concerns, Commandant William Compton Bolton advertised that enslaved workers would have the benefit of medical attention at no charge at the shipyard hospital.

They performed nearly every task required including ship construction and repair, carpentry, blacksmithing, bricklaying and general labor.

[22] In its early years, the garrison of the West Indies Squadron dealt mainly with the suppression of the African slave trade and piracy in the Gulf and Caribbean.

[23] When Union forces captured New Orleans in 1862, Confederate troops, fearing attack from the west, retreated from the Navy Yard and reduced most of the facilities to rubble.

Many of the present structures on the air station were built during this period, including the stately two- and three-story houses on North Avenue.

The company was incorporated by a special act of the State of Florida on 12 February 1870 to improve infrastructure, and was granted an easement by Congress to run through the federal Navy Yard reservation on 30 January 1871.

In October 1913, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, appointed a board, with Captain Chambers as chairman, to make a survey of aeronautical needs and to establish a policy to guide future development.

8, arrived in Pensacola on the former battleship USS Mississippi with the men and aircraft from the Naval Aviation Camp at Annapolis, Maryland.

Two years later, by the signing of the armistice in November 1918, the air station, with 438 officers and 5,538 enlisted men, had trained 1,000 naval aviators.

At war's end, seaplanes, dirigibles, and free kite balloons were housed in steel and wooden hangars stretching a mile down the air station beach.

This was before the category of aviation cadets was established; officers were accepted for the flight training program only after at least two years of sea duty.

When Pensacola's training facilities could no longer accommodate the ever-increasing number of cadets accepted by the Navy, two more naval air stations were created—one in Jacksonville, Florida, and the other in Corpus Christi, Texas.

"[citation needed] Naval aviators from NAS Pensacola were called upon to train the Doolittle Raiders at Eglin Field in 1942 for carrier take-offs in their B-25 Mitchell bombers.

Shortly thereafter the United States Navy Flight Demonstration Squadron, the Blue Angels, relocated from NAS Corpus Christi, Texas.

Former seaplane hangars along the south edge of the air station, as well as a large structure at Chevalier Field were utilized for aircraft overhauls, and Pensacola was a designated as an A-4 Skyhawk rework site.

Three Naval Aviation Depots were closed under the 1993 BRAC Committee recommendations including that at NAS Pensacola, and most of the buildings on the air station involved in these tasks razed.

During the 2005 round of Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC), people in Florida and the Navy feared that NAS Pensacola might be closed, despite its naval hub status, due to extensive damage by Hurricane Ivan in late 2004.

[32] On 20 February 1939, a squadron of twelve U.S. Navy aircraft, described as "fast combat ships", were returning to NAS Pensacola, Florida, from a routine training trip and found the Gulf Coast socked in by a fog described as one of the heaviest ever witnessed in the region.

Three aircraft piloted by instructors, and one other plane, were diverted by radio and outran the fogbank to land safely at Atmore and Greenville, Alabama.

Lt. G. F. Presser, Brazilian Navy flyer, in training at the Naval Air Station, crashed and was killed at Corry Field.

Officers said the wreckage of the eight planes – they declined to estimate their worth, but aviation circles here said the fast combat ships would cost from $18,000 to $20,000 each – was the air station's second heaviest loss.