Jepp is fairly often out of date. I once had an unpleasant phone call with Lahr tower, they moved a VRP from the east side of the CTR to the west side of the CTR without renaming it (which is in itself a stupid idea), and I used up to date Jepp charts which had the VRP still at its old location and obviously this lead to some misunderstandings, and caused us to cross the flight path of a helicopter fairly closely behind it, not a big deal for us because we saw it very clearly, but the tower guy must have had a heart attack. We then notified Jepp and after about 2 months, the chart was finally updated.
Again it all boils down to:
IFR, Jepp tends to be good quality
VFR, they are often wrong/incomplete/out of date, and the AIP is often more accurate/complete.
It would be great if we could create a European Aerodrome facility Directory (IFR/VFR) and having standardized Approach plates. The technology is there the political context and requirements and hence regulation isn’t…. I am afraid it will take years…we are stuck with Annex 15 for the time being.
As long this is not solved Jepp and Lido have the market…
A European US-style “AFD” would be nice but there are lots of free resources – example – which may not be accurate but they have contact numbers which are to some degree accurate and you can phone them up. If you fly something pricey you just phone the handling agent and he sorts you out in an instant.
I use Navbox Pro for this purpose. It has pretty good airport data. Probably from the AIPs (though it does seem to contain some email addresses which are not in the AIPs) and it seems to work. It covers all of political Europe and the one-off updates are very cheap.
Also most pilots don’t fly internationally so they can use domestic airport guides, like UK’s Pooleys (£20) which I buy every couple of years. I think every GA-busy country in Europe has its own version of this, so the market is very fragmented.
Plus you have so many languages. Europe may be one land mass but culturally it is a mix of very different places.
Europe as a whole is such a mess organisationally that it is a good idea to phone the airport to check. In the USA, for a start, most places are H24 so the major European issue is removed.
Peter says, " The solution is to more or less run your own version of the AIP data which nobody is doing to do. Hence we get farcical situations where e.g. the main contact number for “operations” is the public one for Joe Public checking Easyjet airline departure times "
Now you know why handlers flourish in Euro land.
The linked “handbook of Business Aviation” is not that accurate. For example, apparently Ain Draham in Tunisia is 17nm from Portimao (on the south coast of Portugal), nearer than Faro at 31nm. I haven’t checked whether the lat/long are correct or what.
We use Jeppesen because despite all the niggles it is a format I can understand, and more importantly our professional pilots do too. On most business aircraft they are the only realistic option to display on the MFD.
