The First World War also saw the first attempts at the use of aircraft for naval scouting, and the same problems had to be solved there. This was exacerbated by the fact that scouting aircraft would spend much of their flight out of sight of the fleet, and so would be unable to communicate visually until the end of their flight. Before the war, and in it's early stages, aircraft would have to land to convey information, or drop messages in floating packages. On Christmas Day 1914, the RN attempted a raid on the German airship base at Nordholz. One aircraft from this force, forced to drop out by engine trouble, flew over the German naval base at the Schillig roads. The observer, author Erskine Childers, identified 7 battleships, and 3 battlecruisers, pinpointing their location. However, the launching force couldn't receive this information until the aircraft landed, nearly an hour after it overflew Schillig roads.

The slowness of such methods was considered unacceptable, and experiments with aerial radios were carried out. Such experiments had been carried out by the RFC since 1912. Airborne radios would enter service in the RN with the Shorts 184 seaplane. It originally carried a radio that transmitted morse code, but later developments would have voice radios. However, these weren't the most reliable, and British seaplane carriers had coops for homing pigeons - their aircraft carried them in the event that their radios broke. The seaplane made its first contribution to warfare on the high seas at Jutland, where a Shorts 184, flown by Flight Lieutenant Frederick Rutland flew a scouting mission from HMS Engadine. He sighted the German fleet, and shadowed it, allowing his observer to send multiple radio messages to Engadine. These were not, however, successfully passed to the rest of the fleet. Rutland's aircraft was forced to land by a fuel leak after a 40 minute flight, and while waiting to be picked up, Rutland's observer attempted to pass a message to a light cruiser by semaphore, explaining the situation.

Land-based aircraft came into their own for artillery spotting once the radio was successfully adapted for aerial use. Before then, they had to cooperate with a ground-based observer. The aircraft would fly at a particular height over a target, dropping a flare or smoke bomb once it was above the target. The ground spotter would note the direction, and calculate the range using trigonometry to compare the height of the aircraft to how far above the horizon it seemed to be. Once radios were available, spotters would use a clock based morse system, indicating direction and range from an artillery battery's location.

Sources:

British Carrier Aviation: The Evolution of the Ships and Their Aircraft, Norman Friedman, Naval Institute Press, 1988

Castles of Steel, Robert K. Massie, Vintage, 2007

Air Reconnaissance in World War One, Del Kostka, http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/wwi/articles/airreconinwwi.aspx#, 2011