Roy Voris was WWII ace, Blue Angels founder

Retired Navy Capt. Roy “Butch” Voris, a World War II ace and first flight leader of the Navy’s famed aerial acrobatic team the Blue Angels, died at his home in Monterey, Calif. He was 85.

His son-in-law Hank Nothhaft said a housekeeper found his body Aug. 9, although he may have died the day before. Nothhaft said the cause of death was undetermined but Voris had been in ill health for some time.

In 1946, Adm. Chester Nimitz, chief of naval operations, went looking for a crack Navy pilot to put together a flight demonstration team that would be a flashy recruiting tool, particularly in the nation’s heartland, which had no naval air stations. Just as important, it could be a lure for additional defense dollars, because spending after the war was being ratcheted down. He picked Voris, who had shot down eight Japanese planes in the Pacific and was training flight instructors in Daytona Beach, Fla., at the time.

The Navy was the first of the military services to form an aerial team. Voris tapped a handful of fellow Navy fighter pilots, veterans of the Pacific war. Flying three Hellcats, the planes they had flown in their life-and-death skirmishes with the Japanese just a few years earlier, they trained in secret, as any mishap would reap the exact opposite of what Navy brass coveted.

He received three Distinguished Flying Crosses, a Purple Heart, 11 Air Medals and three Presidential Unit Citations.