Jepp MobileFD Matures, Slowly

As a company, Jeppesen is an enigma. A division of Boeing with a long history of quality and innovative chart products, they seem to have been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the EFB revolution. Jeppesen was a year late to the iPad EFB app party and while the latest update to MobileFD adds cool features, Jepp is so far behind their competition it's embarrassing. Still, the latest release does add some value to an already pricey app.

No-no, Geo-Ref

The most obvious feature that Jepp users have been waiting for - geo-referenced approach procedures - is still not available. You can get geo-referenced airport diagrams, so it obvious that Jepp knows how to provide this feature, they just haven't. And that makes the situation even more puzzling.

Rubber-Band, Man!

With the latest version you can do route planning with taps on the en route chart. The you can change your route on the same en route chart with rubber-banding - Tap, drag, drop to re-route. A dialog will appear with the available waypoints.

Chart Printing

Jeppesen has done something fairly radical (for them) in this release: Users now have the ability to print approach charts, SIDs and airport diagrams directly from the iPad without having to install and use Jepp's infamously buggy PC software. Printing from the iPad is especially handy if you aren't a PC user (the CD-ROMs that Jepp sent with my MobileFD subscription were never opened). For my printing needs I use Printopia running on my MacBook Pro, which allows me to print from my iPad to my HP LaserJet 2015. It works like a champ.

DO NOT USE FOR NAVIGATION!

Other Enhancements

A new screen lock button prevents inadvertent screen input during critical phases of flight. Especially handy to prevent unwanted tap input while flying in turbulence.

Readers may recall my lamenting about the Clear button on the route window deleting everything; The route, origin, and the destination as well as the all the alternates. Jepp developers have done the sensible thing and Clear now just clears the route, which is a big improvement.

There's a new GPS status icon that is always visible near the top of the screen, but the maddening part is you have exit the app and to go to the iPad Settings to enable the GPS. What's more, there isn't just one setting, but two; one for en route position display and one for terminal (though you only get geo-referencing on airport diagrams). It's beyond me why the app can't just recognize when a GPS receiver is available and use it. Perhaps Jeppesen's larger customers don't want their flight crews using unapproved GPS receivers?

Once your GPS receiver is configured, you can proceed direct-to anywhere on the map by tapping, but the interface is quirky: Proceeding direct-to a waypoint actually alters the waypoints contained in the route; waypoints you may have spent a lot of time entering. Bummer about that. And try as I might, I couldn't find a way to activate a leg in the route. Jeppesen implementation of this commonly understood feature borders on the bizarre.

Documents in the Cloud

If you subscribe to Jeppesen's Document Management Service you can upload your documents and have them pushed to authorized devices via a proprietary cloud interface. You need to enable this feature in iPad Settings and then you'll see a login dialog appear in Jeppesen MobileFD. This document feature will be very useful for operators who need to distribute OpSpec manuals and other company documents, though one wonders how much that service costs. At any rate, the document cloud doesn't appear to offer much utility to the average GA pilot.

Uncertain Conclusions

Jepp MobileFD has the dubious distinction of being the priciest iPad EFB solution out there, yet it seems that Jeppesen is more interested in the Big Fish than the average instrument pilot. If you still must have Jeppesen charts, then this is what you have to work with. It ain't all bad, but Jeppesen certainly could and should offer more given the app's price tag.

Captain Snarky

Don't Use for Navigation!

The mainstream aviation press is saying good things about Jeppesen Mobile FD, but I'm not sure where to start. As a long-time Jeppesen customer, I've found myself saying things like "Sure Jeppesen products are more expensive and offer fewer features than other iPad EFB solutions, but this is just the first release." Or "Jeppesen has always offered a premium product and heck, some major airlines are planning to use their software on the iPad - That's pretty good." Or "Someday Jeppesen will provide MacOS-based installers, I'm sure of it." Then I remember that one of the goals of blogging is to provide readers with the unvarnished truth. After many hours of using Jeppesen Mobile FD in-flight, here's what I see as the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Bang for the Buck

Let's get this out front, in case you haven't heard: Jeppesen Mobile FD subscriptions are overpriced. Not just a little, waaay overpriced. Currently there is only support for geo-referenced en route charts in Jepp Mobile FD and a subscription covering just California costs about $125 a year. For $150 a year, I get ForeFlight with geo-referenced en route and approach charts for all the areas supported by Aeronav - That's the entire US, Alaska, Puerto Rico, Hawaii and the South Pacific. Add in ForeFlight's weather briefing and flight planning features and it's pretty easy to justify the annual cost.

A fairer comparison to Jeppesen Mobile FD is SkyCharts Pro, which offers only minimal weather features. SkyCharts Pro costs $20 a year for the same US chart coverage as ForeFlight. Compare that to many hundreds of dollars a year for similar Jepp coverage and, well that's just embarrassing.

Jeppesen does provide chart support for many foreign countries, but for US fliers it's hard to justify the cost.

The Good

Jeppesen has nice chart products that are clean and easy to read. Jepp charts provide added value with touches like a wider range of approach speeds and descent or climb rates in feet per minute. Jepp also describes the effects of inoperative equipment right in the minima section, which is very user-friendly.

Don't Use for Navigation!

Jeppesen adds some value, but since Aeronav adopted the briefing strip format a while back, there's not a lot of difference between the two product lines. Jepps don't provide an inset map like the Aeronav charts, which is a huge dis-advantage when conducting a circling approach. Yet pilots get attached to Jepps and find Aeronav charts foreign and clumsy, leading to an argument not unlike North-up versus Track-up or the old pitch/power debate. Whatever ...

Once Jepp Mobile FD is installed, downloading charts seems simple enough if you have a fast network. I'm blessed with a fast ADSL network (you can throw a rock from my front porch and hit the telco's switch building), so the updates seldom take more than a few minutes to install.

The Mobile FD interface has a clean appearance and the chart display is good. There's an easy-to-access screen dimmer, too. There is the issue of landscape format SIDs and STARs, but Aeronav has the same problem.

Jepp Mobile FD's flight planning function lets you specify alternate airports, a great feature and something Garmin has neglected in their GPS flight planning interface for over a decade. And Mobile FD lets you quickly access the terminal procedures for all the airports in your flight plan, something SkyCharts Pro and ForeFlight could learn from.

Wart Factor

The flight planning feature understands most victor airways, with some caveats. If your route includes intersecting victor airways, you must include the intersection that the airways have in common. The flight planner doesn't seem to understand departure or arrival procedures either. Bummer about that.

See the Clear button above the route? Tap on it and you clear not just the route, but all the airports, too! This is dumb for a bunch of obvious reasons. First, said button is located just above route, which leads one to assume that tapping it will clear just the route. Second, the button doesn't say Clear All. Third, there are a bunch of times I'd want to clear a route during the planning stage without blowing away the departure, destination, and alternate airports. Lastly, there is already an X button at the end of each of the airport fields so you can clear them individually. I don't know who is doing Jeppesen's U/I design and usability testing, but they could use some help.

Having spent the better part of my adult life involved in software development, I get the impression that time-to-market pressures overshadowed Jeppesen's QA and acceptance testing. The first version of Mobile FD had more bugs than an Illinois barbecue in June. Subsequent versions have gotten better. The latest version finally offers geo-referencing, but only on en route charts. That's a step in the right direction, but the geo-referencing is clunky and counter-intuitive: You have to tap a button to get Mobile FD to interface with your GPS receiver. All the other iPad EFB software I've used just see that the GPS is there and use it.

Once you've gotten Mobile FD to recognize your iPad's GPS, keep in mind that geo-referencing will be disabled when you display your flight plan. What's up with that? I found that the en route geo-referencing can get ... um ... confused. While supervising an instrument student who was flying a practice DME arc, Mobile FD had some difficulty figuring out which way the aircraft was headed. SkyCharts Pro and ForeFlight had no problem displaying the correct track.

FFM isn't confused ...

SkyCharts Pro isn't confused ...

You're headed the wrong way McFly!

Ugly, Really Ugly

If all this wasn't enough tarnish on the hallowed Jeppesen reputation, here's the capper. Jeppesen Mobile FD's latest chart release contains out-of-date charts for California. That's right. Jeppesen didn't notify me or, to my knowledge, any of their customers. I happened to discover this on my own and had to query them. The two examples I know of (there may be more) are the new RNAV approaches to Petaluma and Willows-Glenn, which replaced the old GPS approaches.

Don't Use for Navigation

Guess we wait until Sept 21?

The new RNAV approaches don't just offer LPV minima that are considerably lower, the fix names and approach courses have changed significantly. Trying to fly one of these approaches with an out-of-date chart could be a serious safety-of-flight issue.

When I emailed Jeppesen's tech support about this, the response was that these approaches would be in the next release. I asked them to verify that Jepp Mobile FD didn't contain all the current charts for California and their response was that the FAA made a large number of changes that overwhelmed Jeppesen's charting division. And for this they charge a premium price?

It's Got to Get Better

I've been a Jeppesen customer for many years, but it keeps getting harder and harder to justify the expense. Buggy software, no MacOS support, and Windows software that can make you want to tear you hair out. I want to like Jeppesen, really I do. It's just not clear that Jeppesen cares about me.

Let Your Little Light Shine

Apologies to my loyal readers for the lack of updates recently. I've been super busy, but I do appreciate the emails and comments I receive each day. I do my best to respond to each and every email, but it might not be immediate and your patience is appreciated.

Brinksmanship

Everyone knows by now that after weeks of tough talk from Republicans and Democrats, the federal debt ceiling has finally increased. If you consider yourself a fiscal conservative, you may be asking questions that few others seem to be willing to address. How can any nation fight two wars for 10 years, bail out their financial industry, and not run out of money? Without additional income (read tax revenues), how could anyone expect the bills to be paid. Adherents to simplistic pledges to never raise taxes are the latest incarnation of the Flat Earth Society. Those unwilling to pay their share refuse to share the pain that every citizen in our nation has inherited. It seems everyone wants someone else to do the hard work. How's that for personal responsibility and patriotism?

Even though the debt ceiling was raised, the FAA authorization bill has been stalled. The consequences of this stalemate are obvious at my home airport: Construction on the new Oakland Metropolitan International Airport control tower has ceased. Wonder how many construction workers have been laid off by that one ...

For their part, AOPA seems to have developed multiple personalities when it comes to funding the FAA. On one hand, they don't want GA user fees to fund "bureaucracy." On the other hand, they'd like their members to believe that NextGen will be the best thing since  ... the iPad. So government is bad when it costs money to operate, but government is good when in provides cool toys we like. I'm thinking my AOPA membership probably won't be renewed next year ...

Jepp Mobile FlightDeck

Speaking of toys, Jeppesen recently released a replacement for their iPad Jeppesen Mobile TC app. It has some good features, but is maddeningly incomplete, not terribly intuitive, and in some cases, offers up out-of-date data. Still, it's a big step forward for Jeppesen.

Should be simple and intuitive, right? Right?

Downloading and installing the app was simple enough. I opened the Jepp Mobile TC app I had purchased, copied the serial number, and pasted it into Mobile FlightDeck. The app didn't complain, but I saw plenty of weird behavior. For instance, entering in an origin airport and tapping on SEARCH resulted in ... no results. Odd, so I just entered a destination airport and went directly to the route field. Entering a VOR or an airway in the route field, resulted in a message saying that they didn't exist.

But I was there just yesterday!

So I did the reasonable thing and called Jeppesen tech support. While listening to what has to be the longest voicemail announcement/disclaimer/reference-to-the-support-website I've ever heard, I got the idea that I should delete the serial number from the older Jeppesen Mobile TC app and then delete the old app entirely from my iPad. That proved to be a good choice. Suddenly the features in Mobile FlightDeck started to work and it knew all about the VORs and airways that previously were non-existent. Okay ...

Mobile FlightDeck understands Victor Airways, as long as you first enter a VOR or waypoint/intersection on the airway. If you want to enter multiple airways, you have to enter the waypoint/intersection that those airways have in common.

That's better!

Let's say you're tinkering, trying to decide which route you'd like to fly between two airports. If you want to change routes, tapping on the CLEAR button above the route will ... wait for it ... clear out the route and the origin and destination airport. Geez Louise! Is anyone at Jeppesen doing usability testing?

Do a looong tap on the chart and you can access information about things like special use airspace, airports and such. Unfortunately, the information often uses a boilerplate format that needlessly repeats field names that aren't needed and simply create visual noise. Amazingly, the Jepp chart for Northern California still lists the Travis VOR. That puppy was decommissioned at least two years ago. Yikes!

Scully? Mulder?

Mobile FlightDeck provides pure electronic charts that are both flexible and useful, but they don't have the same feel as Aeronav charts. You can choose which types of navigation data you want included, but the charts still seem a bit cluttered at times. Zooming in often makes the situation better.

Complicated ...

Better ...

I plan to use Mobile FlightDeck in the air tomorrow and hope to provide some more observations afterward. For now, Jeppesen's Mobile FlightDeck app is a step in the right direction, but it needs work. Jeppesen still trails the competition and their products are still far too costly for the features offered. Sorry if that sounds blunt.

Big Changes at OAK

Contract negotiations between KasierAir and the Port of Oakland resulted in the FBO contracting in a big way. KaiserAir started as the flight department for the companies created by Henry J. Kaiser. It's been around for more than a half century and a fixture at the Oakland North Field for as long as I can remember.

The old KasierAir executive terminal now sits empty and the self-serve 100LL fuel pump was rendered inoperative. Many aircraft owners who rented tie-down space from KaiserAir were sent scrambling to find new arrangements with only a few days notice. KaiserAir still occupies the smaller executive terminal near Hangar 4, but I doubt I'll be rubbing elbows with the employees I used to see all the time. I have many memories of sitting standby in the old KaiserAir pilot lounge, getting a Caravan refueled on short notice, getting a ride to and from the South Field terminal with Tony. I always appreciated the efforts of the frontline workers at KaiserAir. Things just won't be the same ...

More to Come

I hope to continue my series on VFR flight planning and to provide observations on new products and services for pilots, but it may have to wait for crummier weather to arrive in Northern California. For now, I'm swamped with work and a full-time, freelance CFI has to make hay while the sun is shining.