C. Donald Bateman

C. Donald Bateman was a Canadian electrical engineer and inventor, born in 1932 and died in 2023, who spent most of his career as chief engineer of flight safety avionics at Honeywell. In the late 1960s he developed the Ground Proximity Warning System, an onboard device that alerts pilots when an aircraft is dangerously close to terrain, and later created the Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System, which adds digital terrain mapping and GPS data. His work sharply reduced controlled-flight-into-terrain accidents and earned him more than forty United States and eighty foreign patents; Flight Safety Foundation leaders credited him with saving more lives than any other individual in aviation history.