Roy Voris, 85; WWII Ace Formed Blue Angels, Navy’s Precision Fliers

Retired Navy Capt. Roy “Butch” Voris, a World War II ace who assembled the Navy’s famous Blue Angels flight demonstration team after the war and served as its first flight leader, has died. He was 85.

Voris, a former NASA spokesman during Apollo moon missions, died Aug. 9 at his home in Monterey, Calif., his family said. He had been ill for several years.

A veteran of the war in the Pacific who flew from the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Hornet, Voris shot down eight Japanese fighter planes and participated in numerous battles, including Santa Cruz, Guadalcanal, Tarawa and the Philippine Sea.

Voris was a flight officer in the Instructors Advanced Training Unit at the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Fla., in 1946 when Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, the chief of naval operations, ordered the establishment of a flight demonstration team to showcase naval aviation.

Handpicked to form the elite team, Voris chose the pilots, the crew members and the aircraft -- initially the same Grumman F-6F Hellcats he had flown in the Pacific.

“World War II was over and the military was shrinking,” Voris recalled in an interview with the Associated Press in 1996, when the Blue Angels celebrated its 50th anniversary. “All the good things the Navy had done” during the war, he said, were beginning “to be forgotten.”

The team -- the first aerial exhibition team organized by any branch of the military -- was created as a way to boost Navy morale, recruiting and public relations -- as well as attract a larger share of the defense budget for the Navy.

“I’m greatly competitive,” Voris told the Monterey County Herald in 1998. “I knew we were the first, but I also wanted us to be the best. So we designed our show at maximum risk, consistent with not killing ourselves. We wanted to be far ahead of anyone who might be coming up behind us. I’m awful proud of it.”

Voris and the handful of fellow Navy fighter pilots he recruited for the team practiced their aerial maneuvers in secret, lest a mishap foil the desired public relations effect.

As Voris told Robert Wilcox, author of the 2004 biography “First Blue: The Story of World War II Ace Butch Voris and the Creation of the Blue Angels,” the flight team flew over the Everglades “so that if anything happened, just the alligators would know.”

The team’s acrobatic routines were variations of combat maneuvers such as loops, spirals, climbs, rolls and dives. They also performed something new: “the blind roll,” an extremely dangerous maneuver in which three Hellcats, flying straight in close V formation, would do a 360-degree roll in unison.

“It’s a type of flying that doesn’t accept many mistakes,” Voris told the Herald last year. “It’s practice, practice, practice. Total confidence, total concentration, knowledge and training.

“You fly as close together as a couple of feet, it depends on the maneuver, and every once in a while you do a little bump and so forth. People ask me, ‘How close do they fly?’ And I’ll say if we hit each other, it’s too close and if we don’t, we’re too far apart.”

After weeks of training, the team gave its first public performance at Craig Field in Jacksonville on June 15, 1946.

In a 1996 interview with the Florida Times-Union, Voris recalled the pressure of doing the first show, given all that could go wrong.

“We were either going to be heroes or we were going to be bums,” he said. Fortunately, he said, “We put it on, and it went perfect. We were all as happy as could be.”

Three months later, however, the team suffered its first fatality when Lt. j.g. Ross “Robbie” Robinson was killed after his wing failed during a solo demonstration and he crashed before a crowd of 6,000 at Jacksonville Naval Air Station.

“That was the first real deep hurt I suffered with the team,” Voris told the Times-Union. “It was traumatic. He was such a close friend, and I fought with him during the war.”

Originally known simply as the Navy Flight Exhibition Team, Voris and his men knew they needed a more catchy name.

They soon found it after a team member saw a reference in the New Yorker magazine to the famed Blue Angel nightclub in Manhattan.

The Blue Angels continued to perform around the country until the start of the Korean War in 1950, when team members, who by then were flying jet aircraft, were reassigned to the aircraft carrier Princeton.

Voris, who led the Blue Angels the first two years, was brought back to reorganize the Blue Angels in 1951 and put in another stint as flight leader.

During a Blue Angels demonstration in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1952, he survived a midair collision in which another pilot was killed. Although Voris lost most of the control of his aircraft and its tail was damaged, he managed to land.

Two weeks later, the Blue Angels were back in the air.

“Butch Voris’ contributions to naval aviation history were epic,” Cmdr. Steve Foley, the Blue Angels’ current flight leader, or “boss,” said last week. “The legacy Boss Voris bestowed upon the Blue Angels has had a profound impact on our team’s 59-year history.”

Born in Los Angeles on Sept. 19, 1919, Voris grew up in Aptos, Calif., and Santa Cruz, where he graduated from high school.

By then, he had developed a passion for aviation, fueled in part by pulp magazine stories about Eddie Rickenbacker and other World War I aces.

In 1941, after graduating from junior college in Salinas, Voris was walking by the Federal Building in downtown San Francisco. As he told the Herald last year, he saw “one of those sandwich boards with a picture of a Navy trainer airplane with a young pilot looking into the wild blue saying ‘Fly Navy!’ ”

On Dec. 7 of that year, Voris was in flight school, where he trained in an open-cockpit biplane, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

During the Battle of the Philippine Sea in 1944, he participated in the “Mission Into Darkness,” in which pilots took off near dusk to pursue the Japanese fleet, knowing many would run out of fuel before they could return.

Of his wartime experiences, Voris told the Herald: “I got shot down once. Those things happen. But I shot down eight of them, so I call it a ‘net of seven.’ ”

Voris was awarded three Distinguished Flying Crosses, 11 Air Medals, three Presidential Unit Citations and a Purple Heart.

After retiring from the Navy in 1963, he worked as an executive at Grumman Aircraft Corp. in Bethpage, N.Y., where he was involved in the early development of the F-14 Tomcat. He joined NASA in 1973 as Apollo spokesman. He retired in 1985.

In 1993, the Air Force honored Voris in a “Gathering of Eagles” ceremony as one of 20 pilots worldwide who have made significant contributions to aviation.

The passenger terminal at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station is named for him and, in 2002, he was inducted into the U.S. Naval Aviation Hall of Honor at the National Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola, Fla.

Thea, Voris’ wife of more than 50 years, died in 2003. He is survived by daughters Randi Nothhaft of Saratoga, Calif., and Jill Edwards of Ben Lomond, Calif.; brothers Robert of Laguna Beach and Richard of Indian Hills, Fla.; and three grandsons.