Incorporated: 1934 as Jeppesen Company
NAIC: 511990 All Other Publishers; 511210 Software Publishers; 54137 Surveying and Mapping (Except Geophysical) Services; 611512 Flight Training
SIC: 7372 Prepackaged Software; 8713 Surveying Services
Jeppesen Sanderson, Inc., is the world's leading provider of navigational charts and other aviation information. It also provides training materials for pilots and mechanics and serves the marine and rail markets. Launched with the handwritten notes of an early mail pilot, the company has evolved along with changing technology. A unit of the Boeing Company, Jeppesen has offices at several locations across the United States and in more than a dozen foreign countries. Its products are a fixture at most of the world's airlines and on 18,000 commercial ships; the company counts one million users overall.
Origins
Jeppesen Sanderson, Inc., holds a special place in aviation history, having manufactured products that opened the way for instrument flying: clocks, compasses, and other gauges to chart a plane's course when visible outside cues such as landmarks and the horizon are obscured by weather. Before Jeppesen's charts, pilots typically consulted road maps, often following highways or railways, and often had to land in fields to wait out inclement weather.
The company counts as its founding date 1934, when Captain Elrey Borge Jeppesen launched the business out of his Salt Lake City home. Born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, to Danish immigrant parents, "Captain Jepp" was infatuated by flying at an early age and earned his wings on the barnstorming circuit, eventually earning a pilot's license signed by Orville Wright.
In 1930 Jeppesen started flying night airmail routes to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Oakland, California, for Varney Airlines and then Boeing Air Transport. Traversing hundreds of miles of desert and mountain ranges in an underpowered airplane was an epic adventure, and Jeppesen began taking note of terrain, obstacles, airfield details, and other information relevant to navigating the treacherous skies safely.
A number of Jeppesen's colleagues asked for copies of his notes, which he started selling at $10 each. After a merger of Jeppesen's previous employers formed United Airlines, he continued to fly for United, marrying a flight attendant there, Nadine, in 1936. She helped him run his maps business as a sideline dubbed Jeppesen & Company. The airline also became an early subscriber. Jeppesen kept his lucrative day job at United until the mid-1950s.
"Captain Jepp" went to great lengths to make his maps as detailed as possible, traveling the country and scaling obstacles such as mountains and towers with an altimeter so he could mark their precise height. He later hired artists to render detailed relief maps simulating a bird's eye view of terrain.
Jeppesen moved to Denver in 1941. The company supplied the U.S. Navy during World War II, and in 1945 signed up its first airline customer. Jeppesen grew to more than 100 employees by the mid-1950s. An office opened in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1957 to give the company a presence in the Eastern Hemisphere.
Jeppesen's charts became indispensable to most of the world's airlines; airline pilots could be seen carrying large leather briefcases full of them through terminals the world over. Although vital, reliance on the printed page had its drawbacks. A wide-ranging captain could spend a couple of hours each week simply replacing outdated maps for all his routes.
Los Angeles's Times-Mirror Publishing Co. acquired Jeppesen's business in 1961. Annual sales were reported at $3 to $5 million. In 1968, Times Mirror acquired Sanderson Films of Wichita, Kansas, a maker of aviation-related instructional materials. It was merged with Jeppesen six years later.
Into the Digital Age
Jeppesen involved itself early in the shift toward electronic distribution of information. Its NavData database entered service with National Airlines in 1973. By the early 1980s Jeppesen entered the emerging electronic flight calculator business with a product called the NavStar, produced in partnership with Texas Instruments. A more advanced model called the ProStar followed soon after. These types of products handled calculations previously made by the E6B flight computer, a kind of circular slide rule for determining the effect of wind on one's route.
Around 1996 Jeppesen began offering electronic versions of its maps, primarily for the general aviation market. This CD-ROM software, called JeppView, allowed users to print out maps for their planned trips. The company's top-of-the-line handheld electronic flight computer was then called the TechStar Pro.
Annual revenues had risen to $80 million by 1990, when the company employed more than 800 people. Some of the growth came through acquisitions. Lockheed Corporation's DataPlan unit, a maker of computerized flight planning systems for airlines, was acquired around 1989. International Aviation Publishers, a Casper, Wyoming, producer of maintenance training materials, was acquired from Hawks Industries in 1995. Jeppesen had a presence in Australasia by 1990 and added a China office in 1996. By this time the company had more than 1,000 employees.
Elrey Jeppesen passed away in 1996. The importance of his legacy was reflected in the naming of the main terminal at Denver International Airport after him, and a giant statue there of Jeppesen in his aviator gear. His wife Nadine had preceded him in death by a few months.
Bought by Boeing
Jeppesen had 1,400 employees in 1999 and revenues of $235 million. It claimed an 80 percent market share and was said to have profit margins of more than 25 percent. Printed charts remained a central part of the business; the company produced more than 2.5 billion of them per year.
Jeppesen changed hands after Chicago's Tribune media group acquired Times Mirror. It was bought by the Boeing Company in August 2000. The acquisition had nostalgic overtones; Elrey Jeppesen had flown one of the company's 40-B biplanes on his first mail routes for Boeing Air Transport. At the time of the purchase, the deal also made practical sense for Boeing, which was interested in growing its range of aviation services.
At $1.5 billion, the price was handsome, but Jeppesen had one of the best-known names in the aviation community and the potential to expand into new markets. The deal attracted some grumbling from Europe, where a handful of airlines and aerospace firms had formed their own flight support companies. Jeppesen remained by far the dominant force in the industry. In 2003 Jeppesen became the first commercial entity to be cleared by the Federal Aviation Administration to distribute weather information and other alerts to pilots via the Internet.
Jeppesen was introducing "electronic flight bag" software designed to replace the hefty square satchels toted by airline pilots on every journey. The growing popularity of charts delivered electronically had halved the company's paper output in a few years to a little more than one billion printed charts in 2004.
The delivery of information in the digital realm opened new possibilities. Real-time weather and other data could be displayed on the same screen as the plane's position and course. Jeppesen was working on "synthetic vision," a system for displaying terrain, waypoints, and other relevant information in 3-D for use when visibility outside the cockpit was obscured.
Diversification Drive
The name Jeppesen was known to virtually everyone in the aviation business, but it was clear there were opportunities to apply the company's tools and methodologies to other market segments. Like the airlines, ship operators were sensitive to increasing fuel costs, and navigation software that could streamline their journeys could save a great deal of time and money.
In 2005 Jeppesen established a business unit devoted to the commercial marine market. It had begun producing recreational boating products after acquiring Portland, Oregon's Nobeltec brand four years earlier. In January 2007 Boeing bought certain operations of C-Map, an Italian producer of electronic maps for recreational boaters with U.S. offices in Massachusetts.
Another market segment was breached when Boeing Company acquired Sweden's Carmen Systems in 2006, folding the business into Jeppesen Sanderson. Carmen made resource optimization software for the aviation and railroad industries, the latter a new area for Jeppesen.
Principal Divisions
Business and General Aviation Services; Commercial and Military Aviation; Jeppesen Marine; Jeppesen GmbH; Rail, Logistics, and Terminals; Global Navigation Data Services; Training, Jeppesen/Alteon.
Principal Competitors
CMC Electronics, Inc.; European Aeronautical Group; Lufthansa Systems Group GmbH; Rockwell Collins, Inc.
Further Reading
Backover, Andrew, "Boeing Bid Lands Area Mapmaker; Jeppesen Sanderson Sells for $1.5 Billion," Denver Post, August 16, 2000, p. C1.
Cheddar, Christina, "Boeing Sees Increased Focus on E-Business at Jeppesen," Dow Jones News Service, August 15, 2000.
Chuter, Andy, "Airbus Urges Europeans to Rival Boeing's Jeppesen Deal," Flight International, February 27, 2001, p. 7.
------, "Boeing Buys Jeppesen in Bid to Build Huge Services Unit," Flight International, August 22, 2000, p. 27.
George, Fred, "Introducing Jeppesen's Q-Service; Jeppesen Sanderson Has Produced an Alternative Chart Service in a Conveniently Updatable U.S.-Coverage Package That Challenges the NOS System," Business & Commercial Aviation, February 1988, pp. 73, 75-76.
Greim, Lisa, "Flying Brain; Jeppesen Sanderson Computer Debuts on Global Flight," Rocky Mountain News, May 7, 1997, p. 1B.
Griffin, Greg, "3-D Navigation Looks to Send Flight Charts Packing," Denver Post, August 27, 2004, p. C1.
Henderson, Danna K., "From Airways to Electrons; Jeppesen Is Expanding into Electronic Information and Document Management," Air Transport World, August 1, 1996, pp. 95f.
Hughes, David, "Cockpits Shed Paper: The Digital Revolution Is Eliminating a Lot of the Paperwork Cluttering the Cockpits of Business Jets and Airline Aircraft," Aviation Week & Space Technology, February 2, 2004, pp. 52ff.
Katok, Elena, William Tarantino, and Ralph Tiedeman, "Improving Performance and Flexibility at Jeppesen: The World's Leading Aviation-Information Company," Interfaces, January/February 2001, vol. 31, iss. 1, pp. 7ff.
Kelly, Emma, "Jeppesen Signs NASA Deal for Databases," Flight International, August 8, 2000.
Larson, George C., "Fifty Years of Jeppesen Sanderson," Business & Commercial Aviation, October 1984, pp. 43-45.
Lert, Peter, "Computer Wars! Jeppesen Strikes Back," Air Progress, September 1983, pp. 28, 63f.
"Maps Looking 'Just Like Earth' Now Produced by Cartographers," Panama City (Fla.) News, August 9, 1954, p. 8.
Smythe, Christie, "Boeing's Jeppesen Division Charts Future Course for C-Map," Cape Cod Times (Hyannis, Mass.), January 31, 2007.
Thomas, Robert McG., Jr., "Elrey B. Jeppesen, Pilots' Friend, Dies at 89," New York Times, November 28, 1996, p. D18.
Whitlock, Flint, and Terry L. Barnhart, Capt. Jepp and the Little Black Book: How Barnstormer and Aviation Pioneer Elrey B. Jeppesen Made the Skies Safer for Everyone, Superior, Wis.: Savage Press, 2007.
Wolk, Arthur Alan, "Point of Law: Who Is Ultimately Responsible?" Business & Commercial Aviation, October 1985, p. 102.
Yamanouchi, Kelly, "A Conversation with Mark Van Tine, President of Jeppesen Sanderson Inc., a Longtime Flight-Chart Company Based in Arapahoe County," Denver Post, May 22, 2005, p. K3.
— Frederick C. Ingram
