Last week, when doing my flying club’s Jeppesen paper charts updates (painful, I can relate ;)), I noticed LORAN (LOng Range Navigation-C system) no longer had its description in the Volume 1 – Radio Aids section!
Indeed, LORAN transmissions were terminated 2 years ago (08 Feb 2010), however, it’s only recently (the August 2012 Jeppesen update) that they removed a 2 pages worth chunk of data.
Ladies and Gents for history’s sake:
I never understood why we had lessons about it during ATPL courses and question banks anyway.
If I’m not mistaken we didn’t even have LORAN coverage in Europe.
Funny fact: the LORAN topic has been superseded by a description of the… GPS!
Jeppesen goes modern, and our generation of pilots is in for an interesting period:
- June 2010 American Airlines carried out the first inflight tests of iPads for pilots
- Summer 2011, the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) gave American Airlines its approval for the test of ipad in every phase of flight
- Very recently (September 2012), a company (American Airlines) received certification for inflight ipad use for the 1st time in history
- Not far behind (a week or so) Air France becomes the 1st European company to also replace flight manuals, charts and such with ipads
To match such breakthrough even Garmin developed a touch-sensitive screen tech to go with their G2000 flight deck, an advanced version of the G1000 that equips for instance Diamond’s light twin-engine standard DA42.
Bearing such inputs in mind can someone explain to me why in late 2012 in France, Jeppesen paper manual updates aren’t… a thing of the past? 😉
