Harold Gatty, Noted Airman, Dies In Suva

Press, Volume XCVI, Issue 28371, 2 September 1957, Page 12

Harold Gatty, Noted Airman, Dies In Suva

One of the best-known men in civil aviation in the South Pacific for more than 20 years, Mr Harold Charles Gatty, managing director of Fiji Airways, died in Suva on Friday after a heart attack. He was 54.

Mr Gatty was navigator for Wiley Post on his historic flight round the world in 1931. Their flight of 16,500 miles was completed in eight days 15 hours from New York to New York, and they won a prize of £4OOO from Mr F. C. Hall, an oil magnate, who had given Wiley Post a Lockheed Vega monoplane. In 1930, Mr Gatty had made two attempts to fly the Pacific from Japan with a Canadian, Lieutenant H. Bromley, being driven back each time by severe weather. Born in Tasmania, Mr Gatty was educated at the Royal Australian Naval College. He took up the study of air navigation, and went to the United States, where he became senior air navigation research engineer for the United States Air Corps from 1931 to 1935. From 1935 to 1939, Mr Gatty was Australian and New Zealand representative for Pan American Airways, and was responsible for planning the survey and inauguration of the airline’s South Pacific services. In the Second World War he served as a group captain in the Royal Australian Air Force, and was Director of Allied Air Transport at Wavell’s headquarters in Java, and later in Australia and New Guinea. After the war, Mr Gatty went to live in Fiji, where he established Fiji Airways. He was a member of the Fiji Legislative Council for a period, and also played a leading part in an attempt to establish a tuna fishing industry. Mr Gatty was an authority on the islands of the South Pacific and the voyages of the early Polynesian navigators. He wrote during the war “The Raft Book,” a guide to ocean survival, which was issued to airmen serving in the Pacific, and is now a handbook for the American forces. His other publications included a new book which is being published in Lon-

don, and many technical papers on air navigation. He was co-author with Wiley Post of “Round the World in Eight Days.” For his flight round the world, Mr Gatty was awarded the American Distinguished Flying Cross. He was a Fellow of the Institute of Navigation, London, a Fellow of the American Geographical Society, and an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautical i Sciences. .