A news item from KrebsOnSecurity flashed by in a digest: the ShinyHunters group had been extorting Jeppesen—“an aviation unit recently spun off from Boeing”—after stealing its data. The name appeared as just another breach victim, but it stuck: Jeppesen is not some abstract IT contractor, but a name every pilot in the world uses as a common noun. Pilots call navigation charts “jepps”—and the word has outlived both paper and tablets.
The question that started it all: who was Jeppesen, and how did his surname become the generic name for an entire class of documents? The answer turned out to be the story of a guy who nearly flew into a mountain in the fog, began writing down his mistakes in a ten-cent notebook, and ended up building a business sold 91 years later for $10.55 billion.
Elrey Borge Jeppesen was born on January 28, 1907, in Lake Charles, Louisiana, to Danish immigrants. His father, Jens Hans Jeppesen, was an architect, but the family lived on a farm in Odell, Oregon, which his father had cleared and claimed under the Homestead Act. As a child, Elrey spent hours watching eagles—biographers later liked to cite that as his first metaphor, but in his case the metaphor literally became a profession.
His first flight came at 14: in 1921, a traveling barnstormer took him up in a Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” for ten minutes—for $4. At 18, he was already working in Tex Rankin’s flying circus: ticket taker, prop-turner, then wing walker—a person who walks on wings in midair—and aerial acrobat. His first solo flight came after two hours and ten minutes in the air. He bought his own “Jenny” for $500—with money borrowed from subscribers on his newspaper route: he delivered papers, borrowed from customers, and somehow managed to turn that into an aircraft, which deserves respect for its ingenuity alone.
In 1928, Jeppesen joined Fairchild Aerial Surveys and spent two years flying over Mexico, carrying photographers who mapped the country from the air in a de Havilland DH-4—which meant he was literally making a living by drawing maps before he became their author. That same year, the U.S. federal government issued its first pilot’s licenses: Jeppesen held Oregon license No. 27, number 7034—and it was personally signed by Orville Wright, one of the brothers who first got an airplane into the air. His Mexican license was No. 33.
In 1930, he was an airmail pilot for Boeing Air Transport, the very company that would become the core of United Airlines. On May 15, 1930, his flight carried the world’s first flight attendant, Ellen Church: the idea was simple—a nurse on board would reassure passengers afraid of flying. Jeppesen was in the cockpit at the time, and that may be the best illustration of aviation’s state back then: airplanes were already carrying people, but pilots had no navigation in the modern sense at all.
Now—the crucial thing to understand about navigation in 1930. Pilots flew by dead reckoning and landmarks: road maps handed out by oil companies, railroad tracks, rivers, conspicuous buildings. Certain routes had light beacons, but overall, navigation looked like this: “follow the railroad, turn north at the fork, and God willing the road map hasn’t lied.” Road maps, naturally, did not show where a mountain was hiding in the fog, did not give elevations, did not explain where to land in zero visibility.
Jeppesen flew airmail—and those were flights operated in any weather, because the government contract demanded it. The Cheyenne–Salt Lake City route he served ran through the Rockies, and one moonless night in the fog along that route he barely had enough altitude: a mountain rose out of nowhere directly ahead, and he turned away at the last moment. After that, he bought a ten-cent notebook and started writing down everything he learned about the route: hill elevations—he climbed many of them himself to measure them—telephone numbers of farmers willing to report the weather, emergency fields where one could land, radio beacon frequencies. The notebook became known as his “little black book”—and passed from one pilot to another faster than he could add to it.
In 1934, when demand became steady, Jeppesen founded Jeppesen & Co. in the basement of his own home in Salt Lake City—and, contrary to the biographical cliché, he did not stop flying for a single day: he left United for good only in 1954, when maps finally defeated flying. A stitched-bound volume of charts cost $10. Expensive? Pilots paid: it was a folder that saved lives, and everyone understood that.
His wife, Nadine Liscomb, a former flight attendant—they married on September 24, 1936—became the company’s secretary and treasurer, and remained so until the firm was sold in 1961. Wikipedia, incidentally, honestly calls her a co-founder: the cartography was a two-person effort.
The technical essence of Jeppesen’s innovation contrasts pleasantly with the romance: he did not invent geography, but procedure. He was the first to introduce en-route charts—what to do in flight—let-down charts, approach charts, and what saved countless crews: the missed approach procedure, a prewritten go-around procedure for when a landing could not be completed. If visibility dropped to zero and a pilot had a Jeppesen Airway Manual—he knew what heading to take, which mountains to avoid, and what altitude to climb to. In an era when everything else was decided “by eye,” it was, essentially, the first state machine for flight—only on paper.
One especially delicious detail: Jeppesen recorded even the telephone numbers of farmers beneath the route. The modern equivalent would be a weather briefing from three sources, one of which says, “The wind in my garden has been blowing from the west for three days now.” Today it looks archaic, but in the 1930s it was revolutionary: pilots received a procedure instead of a guess for the first time.
The company grew exactly at the pace of the industry it served. During World War II, the U.S. Army and Navy ordered charts from Jeppesen—the demand was enough to keep the company operating at full capacity. In 1941, it moved from Salt Lake City to Denver, and in June of that same year came a telling incident: Jeppesen himself, landing a United DC-3 in a downpour, ran off the runway at Denver Airport, took out the perimeter lights, plowed through a ditch, and suffered a collapse of the aircraft’s right landing gear. None of the 15 passengers or crew were hurt, but the airplane was badly damaged. It is hard to imagine better proof that the tools he was making were needed first and foremost by Jeppesen himself.
In 1947 came the moment that turned private paper into an industry standard: working with the Civil Aeronautics Administration, the FAA’s predecessor, Jeppesen developed standard instrument approach procedures and helped create the National Flight Data Center. For the first time, the state acknowledged that navigation was not a captain’s personal art, but a manageable, standardizable process.
Then came a sequence of corporate chess moves: in 1957, the first European office opened in Frankfurt; in 1961, Jeppesen sold the company to Times Mirror, the parent holding company of the Los Angeles Times, while remaining chairman; in 1974, Times Mirror merged Jeppesen with Sanderson Films, creating Jeppesen Sanderson, a pilot-training business. In 1973, Jeppesen NavData went into onboard flight computers for the first time—navigation data that FMS systems still process today. Paper charts began turning into data.
From there, the story is about scale rather than discoveries: in the 1980s and ’90s, Jeppesen bought up everything that flew or sailed around navigation—Bottlang Airfield Manual, European VFR data; Icarus/OpsData, takeoff-and-landing performance calculations; Lockheed DataPlan, flight planning; TannGuide, airport directories; MentorPlus, moving maps for PCs; Nobeltec, marine navigation. In 1996 came JeppView: the whole world of aeronautical charts on CD-ROM. In 1998 came NavData updates delivered over the internet. In 2002 came the first commercial electronic flight bag. In 2008, the FAA approved its Airport Moving Map for the cockpit. The paper bible became a digital service with a monthly update cycle—today it is a platform, not a book.
The bifurcation point was 2000. Boeing bought Jeppesen from Tribune Company—which had by then absorbed Times Mirror and was selling off non-core assets—for roughly $1.5 billion. The chart publisher became part of an aircraft manufacturer—and, as time showed, that was not the end but an intermission. In 2017, Jeppesen announced an alliance with ForeFlight—a startup that did for general aviation what Jeppesen had done for airlines: brought navigation to a tablet used by any private pilot. In 2019, Boeing bought ForeFlight too. Now Boeing had both halves of the aviation-navigation world under its wing: the corporate one, Jeppesen, and the private one, ForeFlight.
And in late October–early November 2022, something happened that reminded everyone how fragile all this complexity is: Jeppesen, along with part of Boeing’s systems, was hit by a cyberattack, and its flight-planning and chart services were down for eight days. For an industry in which every airline in the world depends on a monthly NavData cycle, eight days of downtime was almost a state of emergency; for pilots, it was a sudden return to 1934, only without Jeppesen on the way.
And the final act—the one that made the subject timely. In April 2025, Boeing announced the sale of its Digital Aviation Solutions division to Thoma Bravo for $10.55 billion—partly ForeFlight and Jeppesen; buyers and sellers divided the other part of the deal, units tied to Boeing Flight Services, in different ways—the important thing is that the core went. On November 3, 2025, the transaction closed: the company returned to independence under the name Jeppesen ForeFlight, headquartered in Denver and San Francisco, led by Brad Surak, who had previously run the same division within Boeing. The numbers, for the record: from a ten-cent notebook to a $10.55 billion asset; from a basement in Salt Lake City to a company that, by its own claim, supplies data to more than 90% of the world’s aircraft. It is a corporate claim, impossible to verify in a vacuum, but the order of magnitude is beyond doubt: if you have flown on a commercial flight in the past twenty years, you have flown on Jeppesen data.
The engineering story would be dishonest without a dark chapter. In October 2006, The New Yorker, in Jane Mayer’s piece “The C.I.A.’s Travel Agent,” reported that Jeppesen handled flight logistics for the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program—the very flights that carried suspects to countries where coercive interrogations awaited them. The article quoted a former employee recounting the words of managing director Bob Overby: “We do all of the extraordinary rendition flights—you know, the torture flights. Let’s face it, some of these flights end up that way. It certainly pays well.” In May 2007, the ACLU filed suit against Jeppesen on behalf of Khaled El-Masri and other victims of the program; in February 2008, the court dismissed it—the U.S. government said litigation would reveal state secrets, and in May 2011 the Supreme Court declined to review the decision. Today, Jeppesen ForeFlight’s corporate materials contain no trace of that chapter—but it remains part of the story, and it makes Jeppesen’s biography neither better nor worse, merely fuller.
Jeppesen’s legacy in concrete and bronze: a terminal at Denver Airport bears his name—the name was bestowed in February 1991, before the airport even opened—and at the center of the hall stands a 16-foot statue by George Lundeen, bearing an inscription that reads like the résumé of a man who occupied every role at once: “Airmail Pilot — Airline Captain — Wing Walker — Pioneer Aeronautical Navigator — Barnstormer — Aviation Safety Pioneer — Businessman — Instructor.” There is one more touching detail: when Denver Airport opened on February 28, 1995, the first passenger to step off the first flight was 88-year-old Jeppesen. He died a year and a half later, on November 26, 1996, at the age of 89.
His tools have died too—almost all of them. Pilots no longer walk on wings in midair or call farmers for weather reports: there is a tablet in the cockpit, and its “jepps” update once a month by subscription. But the surname remains a common noun, the company is independent again after a quarter-century inside Boeing, and in 2024, as it marked its 90th anniversary, it used the same wording Jeppesen used to sell his first folders: “we make the sky manageable.” In 2025, that is no longer a metaphor, but literally a platform.