History
The 311th Air Base Group's origins went back to Jan. 19, 1918, when the Medical Research Laboratory was formed at Hazelhurst Field, N.Y. In 1922, this laboratory was redesignated the School of Aviation Medicine, and four years later it moved to Brooks Field which was a center for primary flight training. Both organizations moved to Randolph Field in October 1931. The school moved back to Brooks during the summer of 1959 and the base became the headquarters for the Aerospace Medical Center the same year.
The center represented the initial step in placing the management of aerospace medical research, education and clinical medicine under one command. Both the school and center were reassigned from Air Training Command to Air Force Systems Command in November 1961 and assigned to the new organization, Aerospace Medical Division.
On Nov. 21, 1963, President John F. Kennedy dedicated four new buildings in the complex that housed the Aerospace Medical Division. This was his last official act before his assassination in Dallas the following day.
In 1986, the Department of Defense began streamlining its organization as a result of the Packard Commission recommendations. This division's acquisition mission emphasized its human-centered technologies. It restructured its functional areas and was renamed the Human Systems Division on Feb. 6, 1987.
In December 1990, the Air Force Systems Command underwent a major restructuring which consolidated 16 laboratories nationwide into four. Brooks Air Force Base and the Human Systems Division became home of one of the "super labs," the Armstrong Laboratory.
On July 1, 1992, the Human Systems Division was renamed the Human Systems Center as part of the structuring of the new Air Force Materiel Command. The command was activated July 1, 1992, when the Air Force Logistics Command and Air Force Systems Command were integrated.
In October 1997, the Air Force consolidated its four super labs (Armstrong, Rome, Phillips, and Wright Labs) into one lab, the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), headquartered at Wright-Patterson AFB. The four laboratories' 25 directorates were streamlined into ten directorates. The Armstrong Laboratory's former functions and organizations at Brooks (minus some that were transferred to the Human Systems Center and U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine) became the Human Effectiveness Directorate (Armstrong Research Site) of AFRL. The Human Effectiveness Directorate then reported directly to Headquarters AFRL and no longer to the Center commander at Brooks as in the past.
In a further effort to streamline facilities, improve quality and cut costs, the Human Systems Center was placed under the command of the Aeronautical Systems Center at Wright Patterson AFB. On Oct. 1, 1998, the HSC was redesignated the 311th Human Systems Wing.
It was announced on October 5, 2009 that the 311th Human Systems Wing was reorganized into the 311th Air Base Group, a move designed to better manage Air Force operations at Brooks City-Base as the installation moves toward the BRAC-mandated complete closure in September 2011. The activation of an air base group allowed the staff to provide key oversight of closure functions, while other support activities were provided by units at Lackland and Randolph.
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“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945)
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)