Don Bateman, an engineer who invented a cockpit device that warns airplane pilots with colorful screen displays and dire audible alerts like “Caution Terrain!” and “Pull Up!” when they are in danger of crashing into mountains, buildings or water — an innovation that has likely saved thousands of lives — died on May 21 at his home in Bellevue, Wash. He was 91.
His daughter Katherine McCaslin said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.
The ground proximity warning system that Mr. Bateman began working on in the late 1960s, and continued to improve until he retired from Honeywell International in 2016, warns pilots against accidentally slamming into land or water because of poor visibility and bad weather, once the most common cause of airline deaths.
That category of plane crash has nearly been eliminated. According to data compiled by Boeing about commercial jets worldwide, there were just six such accidents from 2011 to 2020, killing 229 people onboard, compared with 17 accidents from 2001 to 2010, which left 1,007 people dead, and 27 accidents from 1991 to 2000, killing 2,237.
“Don Bateman and his team have probably saved more lives through safety system technologies than anyone else in aviation history,” Charley Pereira, a former senior aerospace engineer with the National Transportation Safety Board, wrote in an email, estimating the number in the thousands.
“He was very passionate,” Mr. Pereira added. “He was a typical engineer, with pocket protector and pencils and pens, but he taught me what it means to be a safety engineer.”
Mr. Bateman was inducted in the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2005 and received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from Present Barack Obama in 2011 for developing and championing “flight-safety sensors, like ground proximity warning and wind-shear detection systems, now used by more than 55,000 aircrafts worldwide.”
Bob Champion, a former scientist at Honeywell who worked with Mr. Bateman, said in a telephone interview: “Don had a true passion for saving lives. He was a peach, but behind closed doors, when we were hashing things out, he could be a pit bull.”
Mr. Bateman was a pilot in his own right, flying a single-engine Cessna 182.
“He never lost his childlike wonder about flying,” Ms. McCaslin said by phone. “He did a lot of his great work from his 40s on. He started flying and running in his 40s and went on to do 50 marathons. And he had his last child…
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