A retired Navy captain, Voris was honored at last year's California International Airshow in Salinas, which was dedicated in his honor for a lifetime of achievement in naval aviation.

Capt. Voris was hand-picked by Adm. Chester Nimitz in 1946 to organize the Blue Angels, now based at Pensacola Naval Air Station. The team made its first public performance June 15 that year at Craig Field in Jacksonville.

"It's a type of flying that doesn't accept many mistakes. It's practice, practice, practice. Total confidence, total concentration, knowledge and training," Capt. Voris said in a Herald interview in October. "You fly as close together as a couple of feet, it depends on the maneuver, and every once in a while you do a little bump and so forth. People ask me, 'How close do they fly?' And I'll say if we hit each other, it's too close and if we don't, we're too far apart."

In 1952, Capt. Voris was caught up in the worst accident in Blue Angels' history, in Corpus Christi, Texas. He had just completed a curving turn in the famous Blue Angels diamond formation when he felt his Panther jet pitch violently nose down. Seconds later, as he came out of a gravity caused blackout, his mangled plane was streaking through the tops of palm trees at 400 mph.

In his biography, "First Blue," released in fall 2004, Capt. Voris told the story of a life even he didn't know how he survived.

"I think I've used up eight of those proverbial nine lives," he said at the time.

The book follows Capt. Voris from his boyhood in Aptos through his life as a commanding fighter pilot in the Pacific, where he was shot down in Guadalcanal, to the story of the Blue Angels and the midair collision at Corpus Christi that, incredibly, wasn't Voris' only brush with death. He had closer calls as a flying ace.

When Adm. Nimitz, chief of naval operations, appointed Capt. Voris head of a flight demonstration team to keep the public interested in naval aviation, Voris knew he was stepping into the unknown. This was the Navy's first official flight team.

He hand-picked the best pilots and named his team after a New York nightclub advertised in a magazine because "It just sounded right."

He chose the Grumman F-6F Hellcat -- an "honest" plane he had flown off aircraft carriers in the Pacific. Variations of basic combat maneuvers -- loops, spirals, climbs, rolls and dives -- were used to design unique acrobatic routines.

Then Capt. Voris decided he wanted to do something no flight team had ever done. He called it "the blind roll." It took three or four seconds to complete, but was extremely dangerous. Three Hellcats, flying a straight path in close V formation, would roll a complete 360-degree revolution in unison.

To the uninitiated, the maneuver looks easy. The problem was in the "blind" element that would cause each pilot to lose sight of the other planes for half the revolution. The slightest error at that proximity would cause a midair collision.

"The engine pulls the nose toward earth. It's all microseconds," he said.

The maneuver requires holding the stick forward with exactly the right force and precision while you're upside down and G-forces are trying to suck you out of the cockpit.

The Blue Angels flew their first show at the Southeastern Air Exposition in Jacksonville, Fla. Two months later, they changed from flying the Hellcat to the Grumman F-8F Bearcat.

When Capt. Voris was a 13-year-old growing up in Aptos during the Depression, he would pedal his bicycle five miles to the airport, hang on the fence and watch two or three Ford TriMotor flights land each day. His father hoped the boy would become a doctor. It didn't work out that way.

"I used to buy pulp magazines for 25 cents. I think it was called Flying Aces. I'd read about Eddie Rickenbacker and the fighter pilots of WW I and what a gentlemanly war it was in the air.

"In 1941, I happened to be walking downtown San Francisco, by the Federal Building, and I saw one of those sandwich boards with a picture of a Navy Trainer airplane with a young pilot looking into the wild blue saying 'Fly Navy!'"

He called the number and about two weeks later he was in the Navy.

Today a prospective naval pilot goes through systematic, lengthy ground training before they get anywhere near an airplane.

Back then, with a shortage of pilots and a war looming, the Navy had a different system. It was called Elimination Flight Training. A system, Capt. Voris recalled, in which "you passed or killed yourself," he said.

During his air battles in the Pacific, Capt. Voris earned "fighter ace" status, recording eight fighter-to-fighter confirmed kills.

"I got shot down once. Those things happen. But I shot down eight of them, so I call it a 'net of seven.'"

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

Born Sept. 19, 1919, in Los Angeles, Capt. Voris moved with his family to Aptos and later Santa Cruz. He graduated from Santa Cruz High School and Hartnell College -- then called Salinas Junior College -- and joined the Navy to learn to fly.

Capt. Voris was in flight school when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and he went on to fly combat missions off the aircraft carriers USS Enterprise and USS Hornet, taking part in the battles of Santa Cruz, Guadalcanal, Tarawa and the Marianas "Turkey Shoot."

He took part in the "Mission into Darkness" during the Battle of the Philippine Sea, when his and other planes were launched against the Japanese fleet in late afternoon and the survivors made night landings after the attack.

Capt. Voris retired from the Navy in 1963 and went to work as an executive of Grumman Aircraft Corp., then joined NASA in 1973 and served as the agency's spokesman during the historic Apollo moon missions.

In addition to his achievements as a combat ace and air show aviator, Capt. Voris was instrumental in the early development of the Navy's frontline F-14 Tomcat fighter.

In 1993, he was one of 20 aviators honored for their contributions to aviation at a "Gathering of Eagles" ceremony.

In 2002 he was inducted into the Naval Aviation Hall of Honor at the National Museum of Naval Aviation in Pensacola, Fla.

Capt. Voris is survived by daughters Randie Nothhaft of Saratoga and Jill Edwards of Ben Lomond; brothers Robert Voris of Laguna Beach and Richard Voris of Indian Hills, Fla., and three grandsons. His wife of more than 50 years, Thea, died in 2003.

Private cremation will take place under the direction of the Paul Mortuary of Pacific Grove. A memorial service at the Naval Postgraduate School will be held in October. The family prefers that contributions in his memory be sent to the Hospice of the Central Coast, 2 Upper Ragsdale Drive, Suite D-120, Monterey, Calif. 93940-5730.