Reading the Inventory Cards

This page will provide guidance on how to read the Inventory Cards and reports.

US Navy Aircraft History Cards (AHC)

Format

NAVAER-1925

The US Navy Used two different types of Aircraft History Cards for tracking their JD-1 Invaders. The first card is officially identified as type NAVAER-1925 (9-44). This card was in use from 1944 until 1950. In 1950, the Navy switched to the second card, OPNAV-50-157 (5-50). This card came into use in May 1950. Let's look at each in a little more detail.

The image below is an example of the NAVAER-1925 card. This card is very simple to read. There is a fat line with three boxes and under that is a skinny line with boxes that say: J F M A M J J A S O N D. The first thing to take note of is the Date Accepted value at the top of the card. In this case, 16 Mar 1945. That means that the first line on this card represents 1945. Next, we look at the first UNIT listed there. In this case it's VJ-4 (which was later re-designated VU-4). We can see that M A M J J are checked. These letter represent the months of the year. so from Mar 1945 until July 1945 this plane was with the Utility Squadron 4.

On the next line down there should be a check mark on the A for August while the plane was at Litchfield, but we can fill in the gaps here because we can see that it arrived in September 1945 to O&R Norfolk. So from July to Sep 1945 the plane was in storage.

Then the plane spent 10 months at O&R Norfolk; Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec 1945, then on the next line 1946 starts and it was there from Jan through Jun.

The card continues on in this fashion. It is pretty easy to track where the plane was. However, this card is not very detailed and is prone to some errors, as we observed with Aug 1945. The cards are also usually not very detailed and don't give exact dates very often. Consistently, the periods from the fall of 1948 until 1950 are very spotty and not well reported on these cards. as one example, let's look at 1948 on the card below. The last unit that was actually reported was the Operational Pool at Norfolk Naval Air Station. The plane was there from Oct 1947 until at least Aug 1948. Now, the column to the right and below, it says "O/H 3-3-49" scrawled in the margin. O/H is shorthand for Overhaul. So the plane was being overhauled on 3 Mar 1949. This tells us that at some point the plane must have been transferred from the Operational Pool at Norfolk NAS to the Overhaul & Repair Facility at Norfolk because the pool doesn't do overhauls. But, when those dates are, specifically, we have no idea. It could have transferred to O&R Norfolk in Sep 1948 or any time until Feb 1949. The planes almost always sit for some period of time before being worked on, so it didn't arrive in Mar 1949.

While the card is fairly easy to read, it is not very detailed and provides no other information aside from basic locations or assignments. There's no data on status, flight hours, or anything of that sort listed. And the 1949 time period has, so far, been very spotty on every card I have seen.

Codes

The older card, NAVAER-1925, does not use any codes at all. So the entirety of this section will be applicable only to the OPNAV-50-157 cards.