The 1918 merger of the Royal Naval Air Service and Royal Flying Corps creates a consequential organizational counterfactual. The RNAS had built a wartime administration around aircraft availability, engine support, and the practical needs of naval machinery. Peace would certainly have reduced that establishment, but keeping it within the Royal Navy might have produced a different interwar aviation system. Administrative continuity, as much as aircraft design, could have influenced later carrier capability.
Notable Point · 1:28-2:04
What the RNAS might have preserved without the RAF merger
The 1918 creation of the RAF removed the Royal Naval Air Service's wartime organization from naval control just as it had learned how to sustain aircraft at scale.