MAY 1935

"Harold Gatty Takes On The Pacific"

by Pan Am Historical Foundation

Photo: Harold Gatty instructing Air Corps Officer Yeager on his invention - the drift indicator - February 5, 1932 (National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution).

“He is one of the greatest navigators in the world,” Charles Lindbergh said about Harold Gatty. 

Beyond that, Gatty was a multitalented individual who played a pivotal role in Pan Am's advancements in weather forecasting,  navigation, and development of its transpacific journeys. He'd accompanied Wiley Post on a 1931 record-breaking flight around the globe and developed expertise in dead reckoning. His invention of the drift indicator allowed more precise calculation of wind drift and course corrections.
 
In May 1935  Juan Trippe made the important decision to hire Gatty to help develop the airline's Pacific operations. Gatty mapped a potential San Francisco-China air route and identified possible island stopovers. On the schooner Kinkajou, he conducted meteorological observations, studied weather patterns and island conditions that would become critical knowledge for Pan Am's transpacific flights.
 
Gatty also introduced Pan Am to the Weems System of Navigation, which, at that time, was a revolutionary method that simplified celestial navigation for pioneering pilots like Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

As a native Australian, Gatty eventually became Pan Am’s South Pacific regional official. He was responsible for negotiating the original agreement between Pan Am and the New Zealand government, and was the first to greet Captain Edwin Musick and his crew, March 29, 1937 on their historic Pan Am flight that reached across the world to Auckland.

Sources:

Harold Gatty Aviation Navigation Expert, History.net https://www.historynet.com/harold-gatty-aerial-navigation-expert/

International Newsreel Photos https://timeandnavigation.si.edu/multimedia-asset/harold-gatty-demonstrating-a-gatty-drift-indicator-to-the-air-corps

“Into the East and Out of the West, Around the world, What Aviation Needs," Popular Mechanics p. 353-56 , September 1931.

"Pan American survey flight: San Francisco to Auckland", March 17-30, 1937.  Part 1, p.10 and Part 2 p.6. (University of Miami Special Collections).