Waypoints

From a few notes scrawled by a cautious air mail pilot in the early 1930s has grown an international company that we know today simply as Jeppesen. When Elrey Jeppesen first began jotting down tidbits about the hostile Rocky Mountain terrain for reference in bad weather, he surely could not have imagined that he would found such an influential company. Today, the name Jeppesen is known the world over as the company to go to for aviation charts and data.

No surprise there. What is surprising is everything else that Jepp does. I recently spent a day touring the Jeppesen headquarters in Englewood, Colorado, just south of Denver. Attempting in one day to learn all that the company does is a bit like asking a student pilot to fly a Boeing 747-400 — overwhelming, to say the least.

Most of us in general aviation think of Jepp as the company that makes IFR en route charts and instrument approach plates. Over the last few years we've seen it expand into providing electronic data for GPS receivers. That, however, represents only a small part of all the company does.

As if to prove that the company produces more than a handful of U.S. charts, Mark Arvizu, manager of training and pilot supplies, walked me through the part of the sprawling building where airline chart packages are prepared. Here, 88,000 pigeonholes contain all of the charts for the transport crowd. It looks like the world's largest post office. Each airline has custom-made approach charts for nearly every model of aircraft it flies. For example, a US Airways approach plate for a Boeing 737 will carry different data from that on the same chart for a US Airways Boeing 757 for the same approach. Likewise, United Airlines and American will each have different charts for the same procedure.

To ensure consistency across all of those en route and approach charts, Jepp maintains a style and specifications book with more than 5,000 pages. Changes in style come only after careful consultation among the cartographers at Jepp, according to Ted Thompson, manager of design and development. Jepp relies on a number of official government sources for its data, much of which is verified through additional sources. Using that information, Jepp has refined its chart designs over the years. Until recent years, however, changes were slow in coming. With the advent of computers, changes occur much more rapidly, Thompson says.

Two of the most significant changes in the history of the company have occurred in the past couple of years. They are the new "briefing strip" format applied to the approach charts and the rescaling and introduction of more color to the low-altitude en route charts. The use of four-color printing started with Australian charts and is being gradually initiated on all of Jepp's charts for the world.

The airlines pushed for the reformatting of the approach charts. The briefing strip concept puts the information needed to brief a pilot for the approach in a logical order and uses new symbology to make interpretation easier. Since its introduction with the airline set, general aviation pilots have been clamoring for the changes too. The most-asked question at Jepp's booth at AOPA Expo last October was, "When will I have the briefing strips for the airports that I fly to?" The new format is being phased in and soon will include an airport near you.

Meanwhile, the changes to the en route charts provide greater clarity and less clutter. "Pilots always want more information on the charts, but they don't want to do revisions and they don't want clutter," comments Thompson.

The introduction of GPS and GPS approaches has led to a sort of us-against-them struggle between the haves and the have-nots. Pilots with IFR-approach-capable GPSs want all of the overlay approaches charted right away, and they want new GPS approaches as soon as possible. Pilots without GPS, meanwhile, do not want to pay for a lot of approach updates that they cannot use. In addition, the new procedures mean extra revisions and the need to lug around even more charts.

Besides charts and navigation data, Jepp is best known for its training materials. Tens of thousands of pilots have trained under the Jepp system. To take advantage of new computer-based training, Jepp is revising all of its training materials. The new Private Pilot Manual, reviewed in " Pilot Products" on page 89, is the first step. Look for other components, including new videos and CD-ROMs, to become available throughout 1998.

Jepp is also a leader in another new frontier — personal-computer-based flight training. The company's FS-200 is approved by the FAA for use as an instrument training device. Using the FS-200, instrument students can log up to 10 hours of instruction on the computer. The time spent training on the computer is not only far more effective than the equivalent time spent droning around in a noisy airplane, it's a whole lot less expensive, too.

The best way to learn all about Jepp's many, many products is to peruse its 70-page catalog. There you'll find dozens of training books and videos for everything from primary flight training to airline mechanics; from the minutia of a video called Electron Theory to subjects as general as aviation weather. Copies of the catalog, which is interesting reading even if you're not shopping, are available from Jepp by calling 800/621-5377. You can also read about this fascinating company and its history at its Web site ( www.jeppesen.com).