He began his flying career as a teenager by soloing a small plane he constructed himself with a motorcycle engine at his grandfather's farm near Tarrant on June 16, 1916.
After returning to Alabama, Beatty joined James Meissner and a few fellow aviators to form the "Birmingham Flying Club" in 1919 at their own "Roberts Field".
Beatty qualified as a military pilot at Maxwell Field in Montgomery and, in 1924, was commissioned as a 1st Lieutenant in the United States Army Air Corps.
He would serve as director and pilot with Robb C. Oertel as co-pilot, Leslie Walker as navigator, and Martel Brett, a Birmingham Age-Herald reporter, as historian.
He secured the cooperation of Major Leslie Barbrook of the National Geographic Society and William Stirling, chief ethnologist for the Smithsonian Institution, and approached J. P. Morgan for financing.
With a $25,000 check in hand he and his wife attended the christening of the "Simon Bolivar" amphibious airplane at Roosevelt Field in New York on October 18 of that year.
He implemented the first system for air-to-ground voice communications and his recommendation for pilots to report their grid-square location at 5-minute intervals was widely adopted and is credited with saving many lives.
Another recommendation to vary routes seasonally to avoid dangerous climate conditions was also instrumental in making commercial flights viable in mountainous regions.
Before World War II, Beatty accepted an offer from Consolidated Aircraft of San Diego, California to direct its flight testing and delivery operations worldwide.
Beatty invented the use of barometric readings to adjust flight paths en route over the Pacific, now a standard fuel conservation practice.
His training of pilots from experience in mountainous terrain proved especially critical in the Pacific theater as air routes over the Himalayas were the only means of getting freight into China.
Utilizing a wire recorder, the device was marketed as the "Tele-Mat" telecorder by the Pentron Corporation and sold for $250; located in the Atwell Building (designed by Alfred S. Alschuler[1]) at 221 E. Cullerton St., Chicago, Illinois, the Pentron Corp. was one of the largest producers of audio tape recorders carried under the brand names of such firms as Montgomery Ward, Sears, Emerson Radio, Westinghouse, and Motorola.
[3] Beatty signed on as the first employee of Birmingham's Hayes Aircraft Corporation in 1951 and was made head of the company's research and development in electronic equipment in 1958.
Architect Fritz Woehle was given Beatty's permission to reconstruct the decor of his living room as part of an exhibit at the Birmingham Festival of Arts' 1975 Salute to Brazil.