Aviation

Harold Charles Gatty is the fourth Australian aviation pioneer to be honoured by the Town of Gander by having his name on a street sign. The other notables are Don Bennett, Sidney Cotton and Harry Hawker. Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm, who made the first transPacific flight, will probably make it eventually.
Mr. Gatty is probably best known for guiding Wiley Post (Wiley Post Crescent, Gander) on the flight that set the record for aerial circumnavigation of the world, flying a distance of 15,747 miles (24,903 kilometres) in a Lockheed Vega, named the Winnie Mae, in eight days, 15 hours, and 51 minutes.
But Mr. Gatty was much more than a brilliant navigator. As an example, he invented a ground speed and drift indicator, which became the basis for the automatic pilot.
Mr. Gatty was known as the best navigator in the business, and was called on by pilots attempting long distance flights. When Wiley Post, in 1931, decided to fly around the world in the Winnie May, he asked Mr. Gatty to navigate for him. The flight was successful mainly because of a dead reckoning device that Mr. Gatty had invented. The two fliers were given a ticker tape parade. Mr. Gatty was only the second Australian to get a ticker tape parade through the streets of New York, Kingsford Smith was the first. They also were given a reception at the White House by President Herbert Hoover.
The following year, after Congress passed a special bill that allowed the government to award the Distinguished Flying Cross to civilians, President Hoover pinned medals on Mr. Post and Mr. Gatty. The Australian was also offered immediate US citizenship, so he could take up the specially created post of senior aerial navigation engineer for the US Army Air Corps. When Mr. Gatty advised American officials that he wished to remain an Australian citizen, Congress passed another act that allowed a foreigner to hold the position.
Mr. Gatty's brilliance became legendary. Charles Lindbergh dubbed him, "the prince of navigators."
Mr. Gatty was born Jan. 5, 1903, in Campbelltown, a small town in the Australian state of Tasmania. When he was 14, he was appointed a cadet midshipman at the Royal Australian Naval College. In 1918, he joined the Australian merchant navy and while standing watch at night he studied the sky and could tell the time by the position of the stars.
In 1927, he immigrated to the United States worked as a navigator on a 200-ton super yacht. Later he opened a school for navigators in Los Angeles teaching marine navigation to yachtsmen. In 1928, he changed his focus to aerial navigation - spurred on by the recent, highly publicized transpacific flight of fellow Australian airmen Charles Kingsford-Smith and Charles Ulm. He catered to the needs of pilots making long over water flights, where the aviator's traditional method of map reading by identifying features on the ground was no use. He realized that such training, learning the intricacies of navigating by the sun and stars, as well as how to determine and apply drift over the ocean, could well have saved lives in the disastrous 1927 Pacific Air Race, when three planes carrying seven fliers vanished while flying from California to Hawaii.
Mr. Gatty's inventions give a hint of his superb intelligence and ability. One invention, an air sextant, used a spirit level to provide an artificial horizon. Another was an aero chronometer that offset the inaccuracies that aircraft speed produced while taking a navigational observation. The best of all, however, was the Mr. Gatty's drift sight, which he refined into a superb ground speed and drift indicator widely used by airmen during the late 1930s, and eventually sold to the US Army Air Corps.
Mr. Gatty was consulted by many of the great names in aviation, such as Lindbergh and Admiral Richard Byrd. The following is an example of his work: On Easter Sunday, 1930, the Lindberghs crossed the United States in 14 hours and 45 minutes, setting a transcontinental record. After the flight, Anne Lindbergh wrote to Mr. Gatty: "I was very much surprised at how easy it was to take the sights and how quickly and easily one could use the curve and transfer it onto the Mercator chart, and, finally, how increasingly good the lines of position turned out to be....Thank you very warmly for everything you did to help us (including the plotting board and your kind word of encouragement, and for our two very absorbing and interesting weeks of work)."
In 1937, Mr. Gatty was asked by Howard Hugh to manage his forthcoming around-the-world record attempt and join him as navigator in his Lockheed 14. Mr. Gatty had other commitments, but recommended one of his former students. When Mr. Hughes completed his record-shattering around-the-world flight he sent Mr. Gatty a cable, "Greetings and gratitude, trail-blazing pioneer. We only followed where you led."
During the Second World War, Mr. Gatty was made an honorary Group Captain in the Royal Australian Air Force, and worked in the South Pacific organizing the aerial evacuation of thousands of civilian refugees and service personnel from Java. Following the fall of the Dutch East Indies, Gatty was appointed director of Air Transport for the Allied forces, attached to General Douglas MacArthur's Australian headquarters.
Early in 1943, he wrote a book to help downed Navy airmen survive and navigate in their dinghies. Called The Raft Book, it was so successful that it was placed in the survival kits of all Allied airmen serving in the Pacific.
Following the Second World War, Mr. Gatty settled in Fiji where he served as a member of the government and formed Fiji Airways - the forerunner of Air Pacific. He also wrote a book on navigation titled Nature Is Your Guide, published posthumously shortly after he was suddenly struck down by a stroke on August 30, 1957. He was just 54. He was buried in Fiji.