Whipped Cream Difficulties

C. Donald Bateman, big damn hero, passed away on Sunday. He was 91.

Most people outside of a small specialized circle have probably never heard of him, but:

…Bateman is credited by industry experts as having saved more lives than anyone in aviation history.

Back in the day, there was a huge problem with airplanes flying into the ground. The industry refers to this as “controlled flight into terrain” (CFIT). Two high profile examples of this were Southern Airways Flight 932 (the Marshall University crash) and TWA Flight 514 (the Mount Weather crash).

In the 1960s and 70s, there was an average of one CFIT accident per month, and CFIT was the single largest cause of air travel fatalities during that time.

Prior to the development of GPWS, large passenger aircraft were involved in 3.5 fatal CFIT accidents per year, falling to 2 per year in the mid-1970s.

Don Bateman developed the Ground Proximity Warning System (GPWS) which warns pilots when they’re getting too close to the ground.

Those early systems used a radar altimeter to track how high the plane was above the ground. It helped a lot, but it wasn’t perfect: the GPWS had a “blind spot” looking forward, and could also be fooled if the plane was configured for landing.

So Don Bateman went on to develop the Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System (EGPWS) which ties into GPS and a terrain database. EGPWS gives even more warning.

There’s a great story about the early development of EGPWS: Mr. Bateman found out that, after the Soviet Union had fallen apart, there was a huge terrain database that the Soviets had built up available for sale on the black market. So he went to his superiors at Honeywell and convinced them to buy the database, and the early EGPWS were built on that.

Today, what the FAA calls “terrain awareness and warning systems” (TAWS) are required on “all U.S. registered turbine-powered airplanes with six or more passenger seats (exclusive of pilot and copilot seating)”.

Bateman assembled a small team to work exclusively on flight safety systems — over the years, typically fewer than 10 people.
Bob Champion, who came to manage the team for Bateman, said “he looked for innovators who could drive his ideas. He liked people who disagreed and argued so we’d have a good debate about how to solve a problem.”
He said Bateman called it a “team of mavericks.”

Bateman’s team devised critical safety additions, including:

• The Runway Awareness and Advisory System, which alerts pilots taxiing on the ground when they are approaching a runway. It also tells pilots coming in to land if they are not aligned with the runway.
• The glide slope alert system, which warns pilots if their approach is excessively low or high.
• The Runway Overrun Awareness and Alerting System, which tells pilots if they’re coming in too long or too hard and in danger of overshooting.
• The Roll Recovery System, which detects an excessive bank angle and tells the pilot whether to roll left or roll right to prevent the plane rolling over.

The technology eliminated the “No. 1 killer in aviation for decades,” said Bill Voss, chief executive of the Flight Safety Foundation. “It’s accepted within the industry that Don Bateman has probably saved more lives than any single person in the history of aviation.”