Biography
He was born on January 28, 1907 in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He grew up in Odell, Oregon, before moving to Portland. In 1921, then 14-year-old Jeppesen got his first taste of flying when a barnstormer took him up in a Curtiss JN-4 "Jenny" for a ten-minute flight for $4.
At the age of 18, he joined Tex Rankin's Flying Circus "as a ticket taker, a prop turner, a wing walker and an aerial acrobat." He soloed after two hours and 15 minutes of flying lessons and purchased his own Jenny for $500. For two years beginning in 1928, he worked for Fairchild Aerial Surveys, flying photographers over Mexico in a De Haviland DH-4. In 1930, he joined Boeing Air Transport as an airmail pilot. According to one source, on May 15, 1930, he was the pilot of the flight carrying the first stewardess, Ellen Church (Heinrich Kubis was the first male flight attendant in 1912).
Pilots at that time depended on Rand McNally automobile road maps, railroad tracks and landmarks to find their way. Jeppesen purchased a ten-cent notebook and started writing down detailed notes about his routes. He even climbed hills to determine their height and got telephone numbers of farmers willing to provide weather reports. Word got around about his "Little Black Book", and soon he was giving copies to his fellow pilots. As demand picked up, in 1934, he founded Jeppesen & Co. in the basement of his Salt Lake City home to sell his information for $10 a copy.
On September 24, 1936, Jeppesen married his flight attendant, Nadine Liscomb. She helped him run his company.
With the onset of World War II, the United States Army and Navy kept Jeppesen busy supplying them with his charts. Jeppesen retired from United Airlines (into which Boeing Air Transport had merged) in 1954. He sold his company in 1961, though he stayed on as chairman.
He was involved in an overrun accident at Denver Municipal Airport on June 10, 1941. While landing in a rainstorm, the United DC-3 aircraft overran the landing area, travelled through the airport boundary lights and into a 3-foot (0.91 m) ditch where the right landing gear failed. None of the crew or 15 passengers was injured, but the aircraft incurred major damage.
He died on November 26, 1996.
Read more about this topic: Elrey Borge Jeppesen
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