Don Bateman, an engineer who invented a cockpit device that warns airplane pilots with colorful displays and dire audible alerts like “Caution Terrain!” and “Get up!” when they are in danger of crashing into mountains, buildings or water, an innovation that has likely saved thousands of lives, died May 21 at his home in Bellevue, Washington. She was 91 years old.

His daughter Katherine McCaslin said the cause was complications from 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 crashing into the ground or water due to poor visibility and bad weather, once the most common cause of airline deaths.

That category of plane crash has all but been eliminated. According to data collected by Boeing on commercial aircraft worldwide, there were just six such accidents between 2011 and 2020, killing 229 people on board, compared with 17 accidents between 2001 and 2010, which killed 1,007. and 27 accidents between 1991 and 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 Safety Board at the National Safety Board, wrote in an email. Transport, estimating the number in thousands.

“He was very passionate,” added Pereira. “He was a typical engineer, with pocket protector and pencils and pens, but he taught me what it means to be a security engineer.”

Mr. Bateman was included in the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2005 and received the National Medal of Technology and Innovative by current Barack Obama in 2011 for developing and championing “flight safety sensors, such as ground proximity warning systems and wind shear detection, now used by more than 55,000 aircraft worldwide.”

Bob Champion, a former Honeywell scientist who worked with Mr. Bateman, said in a telephone interview: “Don had a real passion for saving lives. He was a peach, but behind closed doors, when we were discussing things, 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 childhood wonder at flying,” McCaslin said by phone. “He did a lot of his great work from the age of 40. He started flying and running at 40 and went on to complete 50 marathons. And he had the last child from him at the age of 54 ”.

Charles Donald Bateman was born on March 8, 1932 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. His father, George, repaired watches and owned a jewelry store. His mother, Gladys (Noel) Bateman, was a homemaker. They divorced after World War II.

Don’s interest in airline safety began when he was 9 years old, when one of his friends looked out his classroom window in Saskatoon and saw debris and what appeared to be people falling from the sky. Two military planes, with 10 men on board, had collided in midair. Don and his friend sneaked out of school early and rushed to the crash site.

“I’ve never seen blood from a human before.” told The Seattle Times in 2012. “It was horrible.”

After graduating from the University of Saskatchewan in 1956 with a bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronic engineering, Mr. Bateman worked as a television repair technician and owned a television repair shop. He was hired by Boeing in 1958, then moved to United Control, an aircraft electronics company, two years later. The company’s aviation instrument business is now part of Honeywell.

Mr Bateman told the National Science and Technology Medal Foundation in 2011 that in the late 1960s there were fatal crashes almost every month, during which a pilot “flyed into something, like a mountain, or fell short on the runway.”

At that time, pilots used the altimeter, which measures altitude, terrain maps, and visual cues to avoid accidents. “But with low visibility and clouds, those signals were less effective,” Dr. Hassan Shahidi, president of the Flight Safety Foundation, said in an interview.

Determined to do something, Mr. Bateman developed, and in 1974 patented, his first ground proximity warning system: a small box that integrated data from inside the aircraft, including the radar altimeter and airspeed indicator, and gave the pilot a 15-second warning. of an approaching dangerous condition.

The device was in limited use in 1971 when Alaska Airlines Flight 1866, a Boeing 727 jet that was using an earlier version of the system, crashed into a fog-shrouded mountain in Alaska’s Chilkat Ranges while on approach for landing at Juneau, the capital. All 111 people on board died.

Two weeks later, Mr. Bateman followed the same path of Flight 1866 as the passenger in a small plane equipped with his device. The alarm sounded with seconds to spare, giving the pilot enough time to fly to safety. But Mr. Bateman realized there wasn’t enough time for the Alaska Airlines pilot to react.

“I was disappointed,” he told Bloomberg.com in 2016. “We needed to do better.”

He did. By 1974, the system had improved enough, providing earlier warnings, that the Federal Aviation Administration mandated its installation on all domestic aircraft. The agency acted after a TWA flight crashed into a wooded hillside in Virginia that year, killing 92 people, an incident that led a congressional panel to criticize the agency for delaying measures to improve the safety of the airlines.

In the 1990s, the system improved exponentially. Engineers working with Mr. Bateman added GPS and critical terrain data, including topographic maps of Eastern Europe and China that had been drawn by the Soviet Union since the 1920s; they had been purchased in Russia at the request of Mr. Bateman.

“We knew as engineers that if we could get the data from the ground, we could do a lot,” he told The Seattle Times.

critically, the renamed Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System, or EGPWS, gave pilots a two-minute warning of upcoming obstacles. In 2000, long after many major commercial airlines had already begun using the system, the FAA required that it be installed on all registered turbine-powered aircraft with six or more passenger seats.

In addition to Mrs. McCaslin, Mr. Bateman is survived by his wife, Mary (Contreras) Bateman; another daughter, Wendy Bastian; two sons, Greg and Patrick; eight grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. His marriage to Joan Berney ended in divorce. A third son, Dan, died in 1988.

In 2015, Mr. Bateman wrote in retrospective Magazine, an airline safety publication, about six recent independently investigated incidents in which the warning system averted a disaster.

In 2014, for example, the crew of a Saab 2000 twin-engine turboprop lost control of the aircraft near Sumburgh, Scotland, after failing to recognize that the autopilot was still on after a lightning strike. But, Bateman wrote, the crew “recovered from a high rate of descent toward the sea surface after the EGPWS warnings occurred.”