Some Airspace Boundary Depictions Flawed…
Well, so much for the paperless cockpit. The FAA has issued a NOTAM warning pilots using Jeppesen NavData flight-planning information to use paper charts until the company sorts out a glitch in its database that might misrepresent the boundaries of several types of special-use and controlled airspace. “This affects a small number of NavData users,” said Jeppesen spokesman Mike Pound. Pound said the company has traced 350 boundary “irregularities” in the database out of more than 20,000 listed. Pound said the false boundaries can show up on data supplied directly to owners of moving-map GPS units. The aberrations can also affect flight-planning information offered by third-party vendors that use the Jeppesen database. He said the irregularities involve the precise position of the airspace boundaries. The glitch does not affect other Jeppesen data such as navaids, intersections and waypoints. The errors do not show up on Jeppesen charts, either.
…Solution At Least A Month Away
Pound said the company is working flat-out to get all the errors fixed but they won’t be ready for the March publication of the monthly updates Jeppesen sends its database customers. He said the earliest the problem can be fixed is by the April 17 release of the database. “It is very important that our customers and our partners know we are aggressively working to resolve the situation,” Pound said in a company news release. In the meantime, the company has prepared a comprehensive list of the mistakes and posted it as a PDF file on its Web site. Several large U.S. and Canadian airports are mentioned, including the Class B boundary at O’Hare. The errors show up in a cross section of airspace designations from all over the world. Of particular note are the problems with the boundary depictions of restricted, prohibited and dangerous special use airspace in the U.S., New Zealand, Brazil, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Most of the mistakes occur in controlled airspace boundaries and clearly not all of them are out of the way or obscure.
