Jeppesen

I know there are companies that people complain about a lot, such as Comcast. There's good cause for that, but trust me when I say that the only reason they complain so much about them is because they haven't had to deal with Jeppesen.

Jeppesen has a monopoly on the delivery of navigation data for aircraft, and they certainly behave like it. The contempt they have for their customers is astounding.

Every year, I have to deal with renewing my subscription. Every year, something is wrong with the renewal and requires manual intervention to fix. Last year, the web site was down for a week or more, and their "support" person swore up and down that the problem was with Edge (I wasn't using Edge and wasn't using Windows), and that the problem was with my computer or firewall -- even though I figured out which one of their content providers was failing and told them exactly what the problem was. The problem was fairly obvious from the error message and anyone with experience in web deployment would have recognized it. The "support" person was argumentative through the whole call. All I could do was to hang up and wait -- without a legal database -- until they eventually figured out the problem on their own and fixed it. (Without notifying anyone, of course.)

This year, as usual, they've redesigned the web site. Again. And it doesn't work. Clicking on the "change credit card" button to update an expired card just hangs. It took multiple tries and multiple different browsers to get through that seemingly simple operation. They also have multiple expired cards on record, but you can't remove them unless you somehow have a copy of your expired account number and CVV code from six years ago. Yes, they require validation of broken data in order to remove broken data. It's hard to see how that makes sense, and I wonder what their credit card processor thinks of that design choice.

Plus, I discovered that they duplicated my subscription at some point last year. I now have two database subscriptions for my single IFD540 in my single airplane. And unbeknownst to me, they charged my credit card back in February for that duplicate entry. No notice, nothing. Just charged me an extra $184 in February although my account normally renews in November. 

The big improvement is that they've removed the phone number from the web site, so now you can't even call and complain to someone who would have little if any interest in solving your problem.

And all of that is without mentioning the Jeppesen Database Manager, the required application you must use in order to download the database updates every 28 days that you (somehow) have purchased. No, you can't just download the files from a web site, you have to use the application, which runs only on Windows and MacOS. On certain versions of those OSes. It's bad. There's no information about the status of your account in the app. The only indication you ever get about needing to update the app is that it will hang with a blank screen on start-up. Well, hang for longer than it usually hangs, because it sometimes takes minutes to start up at all, and may need to be forcefully terminated and started again or reinstalled. I have to keep an old computer running just to run JDM, and I doubt I'm the only person in that situation.

I really like the user interface on my Avidyne IFD540. It's much easier to fly with than any Garmin device - by far. It's a nice design and works well in real world situations, such as with complex re-routes that are common here in the Northeastern US. 

But the big downside to Avidyne compared to Garmin is that the required navigation data (needed to remain legal for IFR flight) is sole-sourced from Jeppesen. There's no alternative. Garmin offers their own navdata source as an alternative, but not Avidyne. You can't even use Seattle Avionics charts with Avidyne. And Avidyne doesn't publish their data format so nobody else can even try to provide the data without investing in reverse engineering, and almost certainly wouldn't be a legal solution based on the ICA.

If I had any choice in the matter, I'd choose someone else for navdata. And when talking to other pilots about Avidyne, I'm forced to say both that the UI is good, but the Jeppesen lock-in is terrible. It's entirely possible they lose potential customers that way, and I wish it were otherwise.