Don Bateman - The inventor of GPWS - Curt Lewis

The undersigned met Don at an FSF conference in Amsterdam, jusr after Honeywell received the  Collier Trophy. Photo: Thorbjørn Amundsen

The Next Chapter For 'Father' Of EGPWS
Last call for Honeywell's colorful chief safety technologist


Being Bateman

Actors and musicians may not like being typecast, but C. Don Bateman doesn't mind it so much.
Despite holding hundreds of international and about 50 U.S. patents on a variety of devices, he'll forever be noted for being the "Father" of just one-the Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System (EGPWS), the nearly ubiquitous onboard alerting system famous for its canned "Terrain! Terrain! Pull Up! Pull Up!" shout out.

"EGPWS is probably the highlight [of my career]," admits Bateman, who retired from Honeywell as a chief engineer-technologist and corporate fellow in June after nearly 60 years in the aviation safety business. Much of that time was spent trying to keep "airliners out of the dirt and the water."

By all accounts, he has been very successful. According to the most recent global safety statistics from the International Air Transport Association (IATA), "2015 saw an all-time low" for controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) incidents-one accident-the scenario EGPWS and its predecessor, the ground proximity warning system (GPWS), were designed to counter.

Bateman first developed GPWS in the late 1960s when working for Sundstrand Corp., which later became Honeywell. In the mid-1960s, there were an average of 1.5 CFIT accidents per 1 million departures, resulting in one crash for every 660,000 flights, according to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).

In its 2015 safety report, IATA notes that the average CFIT rate over the past 10 years was approximately 0.15 accidents per million flights-the equivalent of one crash for every 6.6 million flights-the vast majority of which involved turboprop aircraft. IATA stresses that CFIT crashes are occurring "mainly in areas of the world where the use of the terrain awareness and warning system (TAWS) is not mandatory." TAWS' reliability is also linked to the freshness of the internal terrain databases (and software when upgrades are available), so IATA is also asking aviation authorities to consider mandating the updates.

The FAA was the first regulator to mandate equipage, in 1974, and ICAO followed up with standards and recommended practices in 1978. The letter "E" preceded GPWS in 1996 when Honeywell added look-ahead capability to increase the time between warning and collision with terrain. Along the way, EGPWS became generically known as TAWS, and several companies began to offer the tools.

Always the gentleman, Bateman spreads the credit for EGPWS around. "Nothing's done by one person anymore," he says. "It takes a lot of support and help from the airframers, airlines and even the press." That support includes his "mavericks," a half-dozen R&D safety engineers and scientists based in Redmond, Washington.

While Honeywell is shuttering its nearby flight-test center at Paine Field and moving three flight-test aircraft (a King Air C90, Sabreliner and Convair 580) and associated employees to Phoenix, Bateman says his mavericks will "continue working as a team" and reporting to the Phoenix headquarters.

Over the years, he and his team have incorporated many safety enhancements into the cockpit using EGPWS as the foundation "because it has so many signals coming to it," says Bateman. Included are the runway awareness and advisory system (to help pilots use the correct runway) and the stable approach monitor (to help pilots decide whether to abort a landing).

After Honeywell, Bateman plans to become a consultant, spend more time with his family, write a memoir and perhaps become an expert witness.

The conversation becomes more interesting when Bateman waxes philosophic, free of corporate strings.

On the state of affairs in aviation safety now: "When you used to get in airplanes as a passenger, you'd say, 'I hope this aircraft gets there safely.' Now we don't even think about it; it's a real struggle to get people to read the safety card."

On airline operating costs: "There's a lot to be done. Fuel is one thing, but we bang up airplanes too much on the ground with other airplanes and vehicles. That's where we need to work. My little team came up with a circle around the airplane. We were thinking of hosting wingtip detection in the EGPWS, driving a display. Another Honeywell team is also looking at putting radar on the airplane and looking at quadrants. I think you'll see [a product]-Honeywell doesn't leave ground barren for very long."

On the flight deck of the future: "My airplane of the future will have picture windows in the front, maybe some flowers up there. One person comes up and monitors the takeoff and the landing using a laptop. She-not a he-will help load the airplane and greet everyone, see them off, load the baggage. We'll automate a lot of that, and pay her $500,000 a year. The biggest problem we've got, according to my wife, is the public accepting it."

On this last point, Honeywell is quick to point out that Bateman is speaking for Bateman, since as a matter of practicality there will be pilots in the front end of aircraft for years to come, and Honeywell will continue supporting and researching everything and anything to do with those pilots and their interactions with the machine.

But Bateman is known for speaking his mind, politics be damned: "That's what I think, and since I'm retiring, I'm open-minded about it."