Don Bateman, a former Honeywell International engineer credited with saving thousands of lives with his invention of a cockpit warning system alerting pilots about potential deadly obstacles in their path over land and sea, died May 21 at his home in Bellevue, Wash. He was 91.
The cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease, his daughter Katherine McCaslin said.
Combining radio altimeter data with GPS maps, Mr. Bateman’s warning system became an elegant yet simple solution to the vexing problem of controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) — the aviation term for when pilots crash after becoming disoriented in the dark, misreading instruments or veering off flight paths.
Mr. Bateman’s system emits loud warnings, starting with “CAUTION TERRAIN, CAUTION TERRAIN,” followed by the more dire “PULL UP, PULL UP.”
Before Mr. Bateman’s invention was introduced in the 1970s, such incidents were the leading cause of death from flying. In countries that have mandated the technology, including the United States, those types of crashes have been virtually eliminated.
“It’s accepted within the industry that Don has probably saved more lives than any single person in the history of aviation,” Bill Voss, then the chief executive of the Flight Safety Foundation, told the Seattle Times in 2012.
President Barack Obama awarded Mr. Bateman the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2011 “for developing and championing critical flight-safety sensors now used by aircraft worldwide.”
Mr. Bateman first became interested in CFITs while working for a predecessor company to Honeywell in the 1960s.
Back then, there was about one such crash a month in the United States. Mr. Bateman’s solution was called the “ground proximity warning system.” It used radio altimeter data to give pilots audible warnings about 15 seconds before disaster.
After 92 people were killed in 1974 on a TWA 727 that crashed into Mount Weather, Va., a Federal Aviation Authority investigation suggested that a ground proximity warning might have prevented the incident. The agency ordered that all air carrier aircraft install the system.
While crashes into mountains and other obstacles dropped precipitously, the warning system was limited in that it could only measure what was happening below the plane, not in front of it. The warning window was also small.
Working with a team of engineers, Mr. Bateman updated the system with GPS data, including previously unseen maps of Europe and Asia made by Russian scientists that Honeywell acquired following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The updated technology was also capable of issuing warnings two minutes before a crash.
“Knowing the position of the airplane, we could actually project the flight path that the airplane is on towards that terrain,” Mr. Bateman said in an interview with the National Science and Technology Medals Foundation. “We would find an accident and go fly it and see if we could duplicate the flight path and actually get a warning and see if it was adequate in time to pull up.”
In a 2015 article in HindSight, an aviation safety magazine, Mr. Bateman recounted several crashes the system prevented, including a plane trying to avoid clouds on approach to landing in Australia that “inadvertently entered into a high rate of descent near the ground.” The system generated several warnings, and the pilots recovered before crashing.
Mr. Bateman also described an incident in which a warning was not heeded on a demonstration flight of a new jet in Indonesia.
“The pilot, unaware of the local terrain, ignored 38 seconds of [warnings],” Mr. Bateman wrote, and “switched the equipment off, believing that there was a database error.”
The plane hit the side of a mountain.
Charles Donald Bateman was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, on March 8, 1932. His father repaired watches, and his mother was a homemaker.
Donnie, as he was known growing up, first became interested in aircraft safety when he was 8. In school one day, he looked out the window and saw two planes hit the ground after colliding in the air.
He sneaked out of school with a friend to check out the debris — and found a horrifying tangle of bodies amid the crash.
His teacher punished them for leaving early by ordering them to write a report about what they saw. “You sure can’t spell,” his teacher told him, reading the account. “You’re going to be an engineer.”
Mr. Bateman studied electrical engineering at the University of Saskatchewan, graduating in 1956. He worked at Boeing for two years before joining United Control, which eventually merged into Honeywell. Mr. Bateman retired from the company in 2016.
His marriage to Joan Berney ended in divorce. In 1981, he married Mary Contreras.
In addition to his wife, and their daughter Katherine, of Bellevue, Wash., survivors include their son, Patrick Bateman of Seattle; two children from his first marriage, Wendy Bastian of Sarasota, Fla., and Greg Bateman of Redmond, Wash.; eight grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Mr. Bateman’s children recall that their father, without fail, would issue a warning when they landed together on flights at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
“Now we’re in the real risky part of our journey,” he’d say. “Getting into the car and driving on the freeway.”
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