After 26 hours in the air, the elegant Emsco monoplane City of Tacoma was in the clouds somewhere off the coast of Japan, returning to Sabishiro from an unsuccessful attempt to span the Pacific Ocean. Glimpsing a small break below, the airplane’s exhausted pilot, Harold Bromley, dived steeply. When the plane finally broke into the clear only a few hundred feet from the ocean, it was headed straight for a steamship. ‘I don’t know who was more scared—the people on the ship or me,’ the Emsco’s navigator, Harold Gatty, recalled. Moments later, the airmen sighted the lighthouse they had passed the previous day, shortly after taking off from a nearby beach. Their gallant attempt to become the first to fly nonstop across the Pacific came to an end as they landed on the beach.

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The year was 1930, and despite the failure of his transpacific flight, Gatty was on his way to becoming the man Charles Lindbergh called the ‘Prince of Navigators.’ World-circling pioneer Wiley Post and racing hero Roscoe Turner relied on Gatty’s navigating brilliance to steer them into the record books. Lindbergh, Clyde Pangborne and Howard Hughes would also seek him out for assistance in preparing for pioneering flights, and when the U.S. military and Pan American Airways needed a navigation expert, they turned to the Australian Gatty.

Gatty’s interest in navigation went back to 1917, when he was appointed a cadet midshipman at the Royal Australian Naval College at age 14. Surprisingly, his academic career was lackluster, particularly in navigation. When World War I ended in 1918, Gatty was discharged from the service. Bent on a career at sea, he joined the Australian merchant navy as an apprentice (cadet officer) on a steamship plying the route between Australia and New Zealand. While standing watch at night, Gatty studied the stars. In the log he kept for many years, he wrote: ‘I suppose my imagination was appealed to by the stars and the moon which play such an important part in navigation. I spent many nights watching the stars. I soon reached a stage where I could tell the time by the position of the stars in the heavens. I learned the changes in their positions in the various seasons of the year.’

He eventually gained a second mate’s ticket and served on several ships, including an oil tanker that sailed regularly to San Luis Obispo, Calif. Australia was plagued by recession after the war ended, and Gatty tried many jobs—skippering a cutter, working as an able seaman and running a waterborne shop in Sydney Harbor, delivering supplies to naval ships.

In 1927 he emigrated to the United States with his wife and 6-month-old son. Settling in California, he landed a five-month job navigating the 200-ton super yacht Goodwill, owned by sporting goods millionaire Keith Spaulding. Later on, when he decided that he wanted to spend more time with his family, he turned down a full-time position aboard Goodwill and opened a school for navigators in Los Angeles.

In the early days, Gatty mostly taught marine navigation to yachtsmen. Toward the end of 1928, however, his interest focused on aerial navigation—probably spurred on by the recent, highly publicized transpacific flight of Australian airmen Charles Kingsford-Smith and Charles Ulm in the Fokker trimotor Southern Cross. In Gatty’s eyes, the key performer in this pioneering flight would have been Harry Lyons, the American ship’s navigator, who kept the Fokker on course to its tiny island stepping stones.

Gatty perceived a promising future in devising and teaching a formal method of air navigation. His plan was to cater, in particular, to the needs of pilots making long overwater flights, where the aviator’s traditional method of map reading by identifying features on the ground was no use. He realized that such training 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. One of his first students was Arthur ‘Art’ Goebel, the winner of that tragic race.

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