Wind, Sand & Stars: A Love of Flight

Tomorrow we witness an aviation first, the flight of a rotorcraft on another planet as the dual carbon-fiber blades of the Ingenuity drone helicopter claw for altitude in the extraordinarily thin air of the Martian sky. 

Aboard the tiny craft is a postage-stamp-sized piece of cotton muslin taken from the wing of the 1903 Wright Brothers Flyer. This fact reminded me that Captain Jeppesen’s first pilot’s license was signed by Orville Wright, and that document has been on display in the lobby of the Jeppesen corporate office in Englewood, Colorado for years. I think of it fondly every time I pass Jepp’s statue in the Jeppesen terminal of Denver International Airport. 

I'm reflecting this morning on my fortunate involvement with a number of Jeppesen aviation innovations specific to electronic navigation. For those who were there between 2003 and 2009 -- how lucky we were. In my own work history, I draw a direct line from building the worlds first online magazine, Steamboat Magazine (1995) to using the Internet to share knowledge effectively in J.D. Edwards Knowledge Garden (1997) to Brain Ranger portal technology (2001) and on to the release of Jeppesen E-link Online Charts in 2004. In each case, smart colleagues worked hard to digitize what had previously been an analog, paper-based process. No matter if they were magazine articles, business content supporting sales, Call Center manuals used to interpret healthcare claims, or navigation charts. The consistent steel thread in all this is using technology to get critical information to people when they need it and where they need it. I still do the same thing today with a focus on improving the productivity of IT staff.

I joined Jeppesen in the summer of 2003 lured by the opportunity to join a team working to reimagine what it would mean if traditional paper navigation charts were to be made available electronically. As a private pilot and former airline employee, the opportunity to work in aviation with so many talented, passionate people was a big part of the allure. My father had a Jeppesen charts subscription. Reid Benes told me after my first interview with the team: “You’re wearing a Breitling watch, so I figured you knew what you were doing.” 

Thank you Tim Nave for making me work in the old paper chart factory when I began in 2003. This was back when teams of experienced, senior chart pullers worked long hours pulling by hand, one at a time, thousands of charts from tiny cubbyholes, approach by approach, airport by airport, for the entire world -- over 17,000 airports. It was a ballet of coordinated, manual piece work. Seasoned United Airlines captains, who’d used these books of charts for decades and who came by to tour the plant were literally reduced to tears when they suddenly understood the immense manual effort it required to assemble the books upon which they had relied on every day, and had taken for granted until they saw this astounding effort for themselves. Tim also taught me chart paper makes a great Christmas present wrap (at least for aviation enthusiasts.)

Speaking of paper charts, favorite Dan DeValk story: After joining Jeppesen he took a commercial flight and excitedly let the flight attendant know he was from Jeppesen and would be happy to speak with the Captain. Shortly after takeoff, she motioned him up to the flight deck, and Dan thought “this is it, I’m going to ride up front.” The Captain greeted him: “You’re from Jepp?” “Yes,” he replied, moving toward the jump seat. The Captain then handed him one of those famous, hefty brown leather Jeppesen navigation binders and asked: “See how these binder rings are bent? You think you can straighten them?” 

We knew the flight deck was an FAA-regulated environment not welcoming new technology for very good safety reasons. It made sense to take an ecosystem approach, beginning on the ground in operations centers where there were fewer technical constraints. Fond memories include traveling to Helsinki, Berlin, Minneapolis, Dallas, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Memphis, and Louisville to sit with airline captains and dispatchers and simulators to capture “the voice of the customer,” understand challenges, explore use cases, and work to tie requirements to product features. 18 years later, I continue to employ this same, proven approach in my value engineering practice. Loved visiting the Everett Boeing airplane factory, Seattle Museum of Flight, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, airlines and military squadrons. I’ll never forget hauling the 100-pound Class 3 Boeing Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) shipping trunk in stifling summer heat across the muddy, rutted fields of the 2006 Farnborough Airshow, determined to get that EFB setup in our display chateau. My laptop, which was needed to power part of the pavilion display had just fallen out of the back of the rental car. (Hello Kelly Kaemerer). I watched it tumble and get hit at 60 mph by the car behind us. Examining its shattered screen with dismay, I gently pushed the power button … it booted right up. No problem.

After those initial months of planning and customer research, a number of technical initiatives began in 2003, starting with organizing images of charts on a server in Denver and making those accessible globally. This was a revolutionary moment. Prior to this, dispatchers had to open crates containing thousands of paper charts every week, and then page-by-page update a dozen or more 800-page binders that sat on a reference shelf above their desk. This because of the important, legal requirement that pilots always fly with the most current navigational data. The very first airline dispatcher I showed eLink online charts to in 2004 worked at Air Berlin Airways. I sat at his desk; he had that same long shelf of binders customers had above their dispatch desks, hanging over computer monitors. I asked him: “You work all day on 3 monitors looking at the weather, news, flight planning, and crew scheduling?” “Yes.” “What if you could see airport charts on those same monitors, instead of having to pull down the right book, and flip to the chart you need?” “What? Show me.” I gave him the password and watched as he opened up the eLInk Online web page for CDG, Paris-Charles de Gaulle. In seconds he scanned 300 chart images, immediately grasping the significance of this “analog-to-digital” moment. He jumped out of his chair, shouting his excitement as bewildered colleagues popped up from their cubes to see what the commotion was about. How often do you get that kind of excited reaction to a product from customers? 

Many innovations followed in rapid succession: 

• Jeppesen Electronic Flight Bag, EFB Class II. (Hello Rick Ellerbrock and Gitta Solomon.) We spent years refining the user interface to match pilot mental models, expectations, and in-flight requirements. Think about trying to quickly find needed runway approach information in a bouncing cockpit, with bright sun glaring your screen, or in darkness. So many challenges
• JUPITER project, re-thinking lifetime customer relationships and digital chart printing. Hello Ken Eiken.
• DDM: uninterruptible electronic data delivery; way ahead of its time (“Picks right back up where it left off, like Captain Jepp landing his open-cockpit Jenny in a farmers field to wait out a storm, and then get right back up in the air to complete delivery of US Mail.”)
• Charting on Windows desktop
• Corporate podcast series (2006) “Flying Electronically”
• Jeppesen Commercial Aviation Business Strategy, 2009
• Jeppesen Commercial Aviation Product Catalog, 2009

You have to know where you’ve been to know where you’re going. Similarly, “If you don’t go, you don’t know.” Fond greetings to all my many Jepp colleagues around the world… brothers and sisters in flight: Tim & Claudia, Tim N., Torsten and Torsten, Jeff B., Jeff G., Scott P., Gery (who inspired this note), Becky, Kelly K, Rodney, John K., Cami, Abbey, Brad, Elizabeth, Blair, Russ, Oivind, Leann, Heath, Shannon, Thom L. Lys, Carsten, Peter, everyone at the Laurin shop in Portland… so many more. Over 100 of us worked together on all these initiatives over 5 years. The bonds were strong because they were not just about work, but came from a passion to reach for the sky, to soar.

And tomorrow- first flight on Mars. “Keep the shiny side up.”

AG

References: 

Jeppesen Elink Online: https://ww2.jeppesen.com/data-solutions/elink-online/

Jeppsen Class 2 EFB: https://ww1.jeppesen.com/main/corporate/company/newsroom/articles.jsp?newsURL=news/newsroom/2009/Continental_Class2_AMM_news.jsp

Jeppesen Podcasts: https://ww1.jeppesen.com/main/corporate/company/podcasts/podcasts.jsp?sortCol=title&sortDir=forward&section=aviation&page=2

Managing Knowledge: A Practical Web-based Approach. https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Knowledge-Addison-Wesley-Information-Technology/dp/020143315X

JUNGLES AND GARDENS: THE EVOLUTION OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AT J.D. EDWARDS: https://www.umsl.edu/~lacitym/knowmisqe1.pdf

Steamboat Magazine: https://www.steamboatmagazine.com/