Taming the Sky

Elrey Jeppesen and his "Little Black Book"

Two pages from Elrey Jeppesen's original notebook.                  Photo courtesy of Museum of Flight 

The year was 1930. Twenty-three-year-old pilot Elrey Jeppesen, or Jepp as he was known to his friends, had recently gotten a job with Boeing Air Transport (later United Air Lines), hired to fly the mail between Cheyenne and Salt Lake City at a salary of $50 per week plus 14-cents a mile, double for night flights.

 As Jeppesen recalled it, he and a group of fellow pilots had taken off from Sacramento in a new Boeing Tri-Plane headed to Reno, but after spending the better part of the day flying up the foothills and canyons looking for a hole in the overcast, they gave up and headed back. Later, over drinks, Jeppesen casually mentioned that, one of these days, they were going to be able to fly through that weather or fly up over it.

Hearing this, Ray Little, one of the veterans of the airmail circuit, turned angrily to Jeppesen. Look, Little said, poking at Jeppesen with two fingers, “I know every rock, every river and every pebble on that mountain between here and Reno, and I tell you we’ll never do that.” Absolutely livid, Little later called the chief pilot. “You better watch that Jeppesen,” he said. “He’s got some strange ideas about flying.”

Little was speaking from experience. Flying may not have been the novelty it once was, but it was still a raw and very dangerous business. Too often, Little had seen pilots take off into the soup, figuring they could feel their way to a safe landing only to be found the next day in a crumpled heap.

If anybody should know this, Jeppesen should have. The Cheyenne-Salt Lake run was one of the most treacherous, requiring pilots to pick their way through high-mountain passes, deal with dangerously unpredictable weather, and buck head winds so strong the planes sometimes flew backwards.

Flying mostly surplus World War I trainers with engines prone to suddenly cough and quit, pilots learned to constantly be on the lookout for emergency landing fields. The few instruments on board were crude and notoriously unreliable. Compasses frequently strayed a full 90 degrees off course. With no maps other than Rand McNally road maps, pilots navigated by sight, flying low enough to follow landmarks –roads, rivers or railroad tracks (“hugging the UP” – or Union Pacific – as it was called). When fog, rain or snow obscured their view, pilots improvised. But with the pressure to fly, no matter what the weather, pilots often took off into marginal or dangerous conditions. That first winter, four of the 18 pilots working the Cheyenne-Salt Lake route were killed.

“You know at the time I started, I was just a kid,” Jeppesen said. “These older guys had been flying for eight or ten years. One day they’d send me in this direction and one day another. Maybe the next day, somebody would get hurt or killed or something – that happened a lot, you know. Well, they’d say, ‘Send Jepp over there and let him fly the route instead of sending a family man. All he’s got is a suitcase.’ And that’s about right, too, that’s all I had.”

Not entirely. Contrary to what Little may have believed, Jeppesen, had a healthy sense of self-preservation. Among other things, he started taking notes, using a black, 10-cent loose-leaf notebook to collect information on the routes he was flying. He’d take down field lengths, slopes, drainage patterns, and details on lights and obstacles. He also included drawings that profiled terrain and airport layouts, and marked down the location of pastures he could use in an emergency, along with the phone numbers of sheriffs or ranchers whom he could call ahead to get a weather report.

Jeppesen wasn’t the first pilot to keep such a notebook, but he was the most methodical. On days off, he’d drive his routes by car, climbing hills and smokestacks with an altimeter to determine exact heights. He’d practice a procedure in good weather, making sure it would work when things went down and visibility was poor. It didn’t take long, but soon other pilots took notice that while they were stuck on the ground waiting out the weather, Jeppesen was somehow getting through. They started asking him if they could get a copy of his notes. After enough requests, Jeppesen recognized a business opportunity, and started selling the book for $10 apiece, beginning what is today is the world’s largest and most-recognized provider of aviation charts and data, a $747 million a year business.

            “I didn’t really think much about a system or publishing it,” Jeppesen said in a 1992 interview. “I really did it just to save my own hide.”

From a pet project to an industry standard

The son of Danish immigrants, Elrey Borge Jeppesen was born January 28, 1907, in Lake Charles, La. Growing up in Hood River, Ore., he caught the flying bug early, spending hours watching eagles sore over his home. At the tiny Vancouver, Wash., airport, 14-year-old Jepp made his first flight in a Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny.”

“It was magical for me,” Jeppesen said. “I remember when he cut the motor off to glide me down. I could hear the wires screaming and I could see the outline of all the ribs and spars when he turned into the sun, and, I thought, this is for me.” Jeppesen saved the money he made delivering newspapers and groceries and hung around the airport working at odd jobs. He took flying lessons and, at the age of 16, soloed after accumulating two hours and 15 minutes of flying time.

The First World War had proven the potential of aviation. In the United States, airmail service had its beginning in May 1917, when the Post Office and the Army collaborated to begin service between New York, Philadelphia and Washington. Despite light loads and public skepticism over the whole enterprise, the experiment was successful, with 53 of 60 flights reaching their destinations without unscheduled interruptions. But the Post Office’s insistence on regular daily (except Sunday) service clashed with the Army’s reluctance to risk men and machines in bad weather, so the Army withdrew and the Post Office took sole control. It purchased planes, screened pilots, scouted and prepared landing fields, set up routes – tasks that lay the foundation for future government oversight of aviation.

Elrey Jeppesen stands beside the Boeing Monomail he flew.   Museum of Flight

           Over the next nine years, the Post Office put together a far-flung network of routes, airfields and pilots stretching coast to coast, creating a relatively reliable, round-the-clock service that included a series of light beacons erected on towers to illuminate an “aerial pathway” for pilots to follow at night. Still, navigation was the largely responsibility of the individual pilots. The only navigational information was contained in handouts containing written descriptions of the route, such as this description of the leg between Laramie and Rock Springs: “After Passing Black Butte, Pilot Butte will be seen projecting above and forming a part of the Table Mountain Range. This butte is of whitish stone. Head directly toward Pilot Butte and Rock Springs will be passed on the northern side. The field is in the valley at the foot of Pilot Butte about 4 miles from Rock Springs. It is triangular in shape, the hangar being located in the apex.”

But the Post Office’s standing directive to “Fly by compass. Visibility not necessary” meant that, as long as the region where the pilot was flying was reporting clear weather, pilots were to take off regardless of the weather at the departure point. No wonder pilots called themselves members of the “suicide club” and their planes “flying coffins.” In 1920, one in six pilots were killed in accidents. Still, flying the mail was considerably safer than for other itinerant commercial flyers. The Post Office’s safety program had reduced the accident rate to one per 789,000 miles flown between 1922-1925, while the comparable figure for other flyers was one per 13,500 miles flown (1924 only), a success which led the aviation industry to push for federal oversight. Or, as then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover wrote in 1921, “It is interesting to note that this is the only industry that favors having itself regulated by the government.”

The Kelly Air Mail Act of 1925 required the Postal Office to turn over responsibility for flying the mail to a network of private contractors. The Air Commerce Act of 1926 authorized the formation of a separate division within the Department of Commerce, the Aeronautics Branch, to oversee the industry, including the licensing of pilots, the certification of aircraft and establishment of flight rules. It included six sections: Inspection, Licensing, Medical, Engineering, Statistical and Enforcement.

"I was a very timid wing-walker," Jeppesen said of his barnstorming days.

Jeppesen had plans to become an aeronautical engineer, and had been accepted into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology but, as he put it, “I couldn’t get out of the airplane.” His last year of high school, he bought his own Jenny for $500 and flew off with Tex Rankin’s Flying Circus, working as a ticket taker, a prop turner, a wing walker and an acrobatic pilot. “I was a very timid wing-walker,” Jeppesen confessed. “I’d only do it when the other guy wouldn’t show up.” The 27th pilot to be officially licensed in the state of Oregon, Jeppesen received his license at the age of 20, signed by none other than Orville Wright.

Jeppesen barnstormed all the way to Dallas, where he found a job ferrying an airplane to New Orleans, filled in for a photo pilot and started work flying for Fairchild Aerial Surveys. He learned how to fly a “strip” pattern for photography. By 22, he was taking photographers over the Mexican jungles in a de Havilland DH-4 biplane. It was with Fairchild that Jeppesen taught himself to fly by compass. “Down in Mexico, with Fairchild, I used to fly on instruments between Mexico City and Tampico. I didn’t have to worry about the letdown because I had the whole Gulf to shoot at. I’d just fly over the inland until I was pretty certain I was over the flat area or the water. If I was over the water, I’d come back and run a landfall, then up the coast to Tampico.”

             By 1930, work had dried up. The Depression was on and flying jobs were scarce. Jeppesen returned to the Pacific Northwest. He flew a variety of jobs, first for Varney out of Portland, Ore., then briefly for Boeing flying the mail on the Oakland-Chicago route, and later with Fairchild flying a run between St.Paul, Minn., and Eau Claire, Wisc., before taking the Cheyenne-Salt Lake job.

            “It was rough flying over those mountains. You’d fly from one emergency field to the next. Lots of times you’d sit there until the storm passed by and then go on,” Jeppesen recalled. “It’s hard to believe now, but back then, we didn't have much to go on at all. You’d come chugging along there at night...there aren’t any lights to speak of around the airport, except for a beacon...you hoped.”

            Clearly, the technique Jeppesen had used in Mexico for descending through an overcast was not going to work in the Wyoming mountains, so he started taking notes. “I just started writing it all down. I drove all the way from Chicago to Oakland and checked out emergency fields and the obstructions around them, different ways to get in, how far they were from the railway track and the highway,” he recalled.

            The government was not in the map-making business, so Jeppesen scoured for information wherever he could. “I never did see any government charts in those days. We didn’t have much of anything, really. Rand McNally wasn’t making aeronautical charts. The best information I got was from the engineering department at the Union Pacific in Omaha. But a lot of it, why, I’d just go out and get myself. I’d maybe drive or fly out there and try to get an elevation at the base and an estimate for the top. Some of them I climbed up with an altimeter, which seemed like a pretty antiquated way of doing it, but it was all I had. I’d get a lot from pilots, too. I used to send these things out [a form with courses, elevations, distances, etc.]. The pilot could sketch in the information then we’d have to go back and survey it.”

At first, Jeppesen gave copies of his book to friends. But the demand became so great he decided to sell them for $10 apiece. When low-frequency radio beacons became available in 1931, Jeppesen updated his black book to show pilots how to follow radio beacons, and added mileage reference charts and terrain elevation profiles.

            “The stations were kind of spotted across the country, not really what you could call an airway system, nothing at all like you have now. But they weren’t using them. They had no procedures for them, no charts, just nothing at all. In fact, they never even published the frequencies for quite a long while. You couldn’t even find out where the legs ran. I guess the government didn’t want us fooling around with them.”

Air mail plane preparing to take off from the Truckee Flying Field in the early 30s.

But Jeppesen decided to anyway. “We had dug some of the frequencies out of the Department of Commerce by then. Anyway, I’d fly over to Laramie or Rock Springs and various places trying to figure out how you could use the ranges to get down under a ceiling of maybe 500 or 600 feet. I’d do it in visual conditions, of course, and then I’d write it all down so I’d have it for a bad night.

“I’d go out and fly a five or ten mile circle [around the airfield] and take a look. Then I’d figure that the logical way to do it was to come in on this beam or that beam, get the cone of silence [directly over the radio beacon] and then turn ten degrees this way or thirty that way. Then I’d figure 30 seconds later or a minute, you’d have to pull up if you didn’t see the airport.

“I probably worked out most of the procedures between Chicago and Oakland that way, between 1932 or 1933. Lots of other fellows, the younger ones, were trying to do the same thing. And they would pass the information on to me.”

The radio signals were crude, especially by today’s standards, and could only tell a pilot if he was left or right of course, not how far away they were from the station. “There was no other way to tell how far out on the range leg you were and that could get confusing. I remember the east leg of the Salt Lake range, you’d fly north and south across it and get 20 or 25 on-course signals because the thing would bounce around between those peaks. Even when you knew where you were on the approach, it wasn’t easy. You had to be careful around those mountains.”

And though planes were equipped then with two-way radios, there was no air traffic control. Pilots could call ahead to an on-field dispatcher and get weather conditions, announce their estimated time of arrival or ask what time the diner in town closed for the night. “The manager there at Salt Lake had a phone put in at the far corner of the field to get way from all the noise, then he’d listen for you and give you a position report. “Yeah, I hear you, Jepp, over to the northwest, blurp your engine.” At least then you knew you were past the mountains so you’d go back to the range station and work a letdown.”

By 1934, Jeppesen had switched from flying mail to flying passengers, but he continued to offer his notebook as a sideline. By 1934, the demand for his book was greater than he could fill without help. So Jeppesen borrowed $400 from a Salt Lake City bank and had 150 copies lithographed with the title Airway Manual. He grossed only $235 that first year, and supported his hobby with his flying pay.

In 1936, Jeppesen met his wife, Nadine, one of aviation’s first stewardesses. While he continued to fly for United Air Lines, Nadine worked out their Salt Lake City basement, compiling information and bossing the part-time help she hired. Their business finally broke even in 1939, when Navy units began to use the manuals, which then covered most of the western states. Soon after Pearl Harbor, the Navy’s Hydrographic Office adopted the manuals and used them throughout the war.

Airlines, too, started asking for the manuals. “I had been talking to United Airlines and they wanted the manuals so I printed up 50 procedures and let them have those. I just kept enlarging it from there. I had the whole United States charted like this when the war broke out.”

From a sideline run out of their basement,  Elrey and Nadine turned Jeppesen into a $747 million per year business.

With little competition, Jeppesen’s sideline turned into a thriving business. “Oh, there must have been seven or eight fellows trying to get into the business. They never really got anywhere with it. I’ve got one of them around here somewhere by a fellow who was a dispatcher at Braniff. He was under a handicap, because he was doing it from the ground. I was doing it from the cockpit.

 “I never could understand why none of the big companies like Rand McNally got into it. I guess they were making so much money in the road map business they couldn’t see aviation coming. I know I was told that every time Rand McNally checked up on me, they thought I was going broke. I guess I had them fooled. I think they thought the government was going to take it over. The government eventually did start making charts but not until about 1938, I think.”

If Jeppesen counted himself as fortunate to have so little competition, it might have been because it was a task no one was willing to do, or perhaps because Jeppesen was simply harder working and more meticulous than everybody else. “I didn’t know anything about printing but I learned quick. Learned about paper, too. Grain, crackle, burst, that sort of thing. Over the years, we’ve done a lot of things that you wouldn’t think would make a difference.” For example, “During the war, I had to go see Forrestal (Secretary of the Navy) to get a barrel of titanium so the paper would be opaque enough to print on both sides without showing through. Look at this binder, with seven rings. It had to have seven because the paper’s so light it would rip too easy with fewer rings. Then we put the lock booster on the rings so the binder wouldn’t open up and spill everything all over the cockpit. Then we figured out that putting round corners on the plates would keep them from getting dog-eared after a month or two. Little things like that really made a difference, I think.”

Jeppesen continued to fly for United Air Lines until 1954, when he retired in order to run his charting business full time. The federal government was then building what we know today as the federal airway and air traffic control system, and Jeppesen’s charts would become an integral part of it. Considered the industry standard for aerial navigation, Jeppesen’s charts became the model for his sole competitor, the government itself.

In 1941, Jeppesen and his wife moved the business to the Denver suburb of Englewood, where it remains today. In 1961, Jeppesen sold out to Times-Mirror Co., but he was to be a vital part of the business practically until his death in 1996. 

Jeppesen also continued to fly. Friend and former Jeppesen senior vice president James Terpstra, whom Jeppesen hired to design flight training manuals in 1968 and who then rose to become the company’s chief charting expert, tells a story of a day late in Jeppesen’s life. It was a beautiful, cloudless morning along the Colorado Rockies, so Terpstra called up Jeppesen and said, “Hey, Jepp, why don’t we take the afternoon off and fly down to Colorado Springs for lunch?” Still with some funny ideas about flying, still meticulous and safety-conscious as ever, Jeppesen answered, “On one condition, we fly IFR [on instruments].”

 In 1995, his contribution to air safety and navigation were recognized when the terminal building at the new Denver International Airport was named after him. In 2000, the company was bought by Boeing.

“People say it’s a small world. They ought to try charting it,” Jeppesen quipped to a reporter.

Statue commemorating Jeppesen inside Denver International Airport  terminal.