Hinton achieved fame as one of the two pilots, along with Elmer F. Stone, of the Curtiss NC flying boat "NC-4", the first aircraft to make a transatlantic flight, in May 1919.

[7] Hinton and Kloor wrote letters home which their families sold to newspapers describing the flight, which prompted the Navy to start enforcing rarely used censorship rules.

Walter then married another divorcee, Carrie Susan (Muller) Knapp, in a church near Times Square in New York City on New Year's Eve, 1931.

[10] The 100-year anniversary of his transatlantic flight was celebrated on Walter Hinton Day at the Van Wert County Regional Airport (KVNW) on May 18, 2019.

One of his happiest events of his later years was being a special guest on an early supersonic transatlantic flight of the Concorde, making the trip which had first taken Hinton 19 days in less than four hours.