From captain Jeppesen´s little black book to the iPad and beyond

Capt. Elrey B. Jeppesen started his career as an airmail pilot for Boeing Air Transport in the 1930s. While this era marked a large upturn of commercial aviation, it also suffered from many serious accidents caused by pilots losing orientation in bad visibility and crashing into obstacles or terrain when descending and attempting to reestablish ground contact. For his personal safety Capt. Jeppesen started collecting sketches of airfields and obstacles in his famous little black book. He navigated his way by following telegraph lines and railways, and frequently called farmers to get the most current weather conditions. Later he started a business when other pilots requested copies of his little black book. Jeppesen´s business grew fast, and the requests for his airway manuals - both by pilots and airlines - continued to grow. Along with that more and more airports, airways, and NavAids where added. Today it covers about 75,000 charts for 15,000 airports worldwide. The downside of this development was that paper charts became more cluttered, multiple approach procedures were frequently combined on one page, and “the binders” became much larger and heavier over time. The first major change in the use of paper charts in the cockpit after more than 70 years came in 2003 with the advent of Electronic Flight Bags (EFB) on the Boeing 777. The EFB included electronic copies of Terminal Charts and a digital Airport Moving Map. The big revolution of EFBs for general, business, and commercial aviation came with the operational approval for use of Apple´s iPad as an EFB platform. The current development integrates more and more functions from formerly separate displays (respectively print-outs) such as NOTAMs, weather, or traffic into one single application.