All that remained was to try the inventions by putting them to use, and this was the reason for the 1921 trip from Lisbon to Funchal, albeit they first tested the sextant in the air by flying to Cabo da Roca headland on the coast near Lisbon. On 22 March 1921, they took off from the Bom Sucesso dock, arriving in Funchal after a flight that covered 530 nautical miles in 7 hours and 40 minutes. In addition to Sacadura Cabral (mission commander and pilot) and Gago Coutinho (navigator), the crew included Ortins Bettencourt (co-pilot) and Roger Soubiran (mechanic). In 1922, in a journey that lasted in all from 30 March to 17 June, with no radio support, they made the first air crossing of the South Atlantic, beginning in Lisbon and arriving in Rio de Janeiro. The 4,527 nautical miles took a total of 62 hours and 26 minutes in the air.

Various political regimes during both the First Republic and the New State took advantage of the public prestige that resulted from this feat, with the crossing of the Southern Atlantic recalling the exploit of the Discoveries, both through the symbolism of the Cross of Christ on the seaplane’s wings and in the shape of the new world which the Atlantic – thus far unknown airspace – continued to represent.

At the beginning of the 1930’s, the German aircraft manufacturer Dornier invited Gago Coutinho to join the crew of the huge Do X seaplane as co-navigator, on a trip to South America that also used his sextant. In later life, already aged seventy-four, the desire to reconstitute his journeys and the search for results – particularly the route taken by Pedro Álvares Cabral – led him to undertake a sea journey aboard the “Foz do Douro” that lasted 105 days (103 of them out of sight of land) and covered 8,740 nautical miles.

In 1925, as both its longest-standing member and the one who had submitted the largest number of works, he was appointed President of the Cartography Commission. He held this position until the Commission was reorganised and renamed the Board for Geographic Missions and Colonial Research (JMGIC, 1936), of which he was the first President. In 1928, the Ministry of War chose him to chair the committee charged with reorganising the country’s geographic, land survey and cartographic services. The next year he became the first President of the National Education Board, which was later to become the Institute for High Culture (IAC) and now the Camões Institute (Instituto Camões). He was also chosen to be a member of a committee that was to evaluate both the future creation of an airport in the Azores and air travel in the colonies. The ministry in charge of this project delegated him to carry out cartographic studies in France and Italy, and in 1931 to go to Brazil to look for documentation that would help understand the history of Portuguese cartography. He was Secretary-General of the Lisbon Naval Association (ANL), where in 1900 he had been the instructor on the first "Sailing Master" course. In 1926, he became a member of the committee that organised the future Maritime Museum. On 16 June 1933, he joined the “commission charged with conducting the study on the plan for a monument to Prince Henry the Navigator in Sagres” (Diário de Governo, Series II, 16 June 1933).

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