There is no doubt that Jeppesen is doing a great job with their charts/plates.
I agree re the AIPs being often full of crap but if any trouble blows up, the AIP will be thrown at you for sure. And one finds some strange stuff in there... for example if you go to Pontoise, you get assigned a SID which is not published. It turns out to be a SID for Le Bourget!
If you mean the TSU and VILLA SIDs, these now appear for LFPT and LFPB in Jeppesen. In my experience so far, Jepp are better at putting STARs and SIDs under multiple. ICAO codes. Look at the AIPs for Coventry/Birmingham and the GROVE arrivals.
Or maybe Apple would allow an app into their shop which kills its screen until one of the side
buttons is pressed?
as I am following the development of the Bendix-King myWingMan app (future price 299EUR p.a. for all of Europe IFR/VFR) - it has got that lock feature (i.e. Apple allows it already) which you can activate once you have displayed an approach or airway chart. It's a symbol showing an open or closed padlock in the very right upper corner of the program.
The exchange of data with Eurocontrol is quite complicated and takes lots of patience and effort to work it out, but lots of data is available. Apple allows apps to lock down the iPad screen. Then you have the approach chart stable on your screen. I have no idea how Jepp gets the German VFR airport charts.
The Jepp IFR terminal charts are highly priced, but very consistent. Every pilot is of course free to pay up the money and be happy with the charts. If you want to go for an alternative approach, using the AIP charts is an option...
That's a very interesting post.
May I ask what kind of info EAD "push" to you - apart from the terminal charts? Can you get e.g. airspace data?
I agree that the EAD/AIP terminal charts are quite usable if you are willing to scroll them up and down. What Jepp did is they produced a style which is readable whole-page without scrolling. I really don't like having to interact with a display device during a potentially complicated approach - especially one like the Ipad on which it is impossible (short of a jailbreak) to kill the touch screen during certain critical contexts. I am now testing the Lenovo Tablet 2 and since that runs Win8 and isn't locked in any way, it should be possible to disable the touch screen (and indeed there is an open source app which does that for Win7). Or maybe Apple would allow an app into their shop which kills its screen until one of the side buttons is pressed?
So, how do Jepp get the German VFR airport charts?
Of course Jepp IFR terminal chart pricing is outrageous (c. €2k/year for Europe) for private pilots.
OK. This is from our experience as data provider to the aviation market.
Most of the AIP VFR plates are available from the PAMS system of Eurocontrol. Most small VFR only airfields in about all of the European countries are just there. OK, German VFR fields are a good example that the PAMS system of Eurocontrol is not 100% complete, but on the other hand, it has plates available of places in Eastern Europe, the Balkan, Scandinavia and even of some countries in the Middle East and ... Asia.
There are solutions that make it possible to create a simple route-pack on A5 from the PAMS plates so you can print them out. True, I agree that in some cases the charts will then not be easy to read, but in most cases, the A5 size seems even fine to me (at middle age needing glasses but still refusing the use them). On the iPad, you just enlarge the chart and you can load the route-pack easily to your iPad, so you have all the plates you need in one place with you for your trip.
See here a video on how we create A5 booklets from Eurocontrol delivered plates both VFR and IFR here:
The PAMS system is pretty smart as it pushes AIRAC cycle updates to our system.
Then the minima, which are missing on many of the AIP plates. If you want to fly according to EU-OPS, and you have an iPhone or iPad, then download this free iPhone/iPad app to help you calculate the EU-OPS minima: DA, MDA and RVR. You need to invest some time initially to figure out how to do it, but then it is a breeze. The hardest part is finding the type of landing/approach lighting system on the AIP charts. The rest is easy to find.
The iPhone/iPad app can be downloaded here for free from the Apple Appstore. An explanation on how to use it can be found here on my blog.
Eurocontrol EAD/CFMU/IFPS information is available but it is quite a challenge to get going with it. You will need to build your own infrastructure to provide your clients with the data. And ... indeed not all the information is there.
Jepp may be exceeding ICAO but the fact is that they are the standard the world over. I think the AIP charts just discharge the ICAO obligation to publish the data. The German ones may be good but the UK ones use a lot of very small text which is OK in A4 but is hard to read in A5, and still hard to read on say an Ipad unless one is young 
Whereas the Jepp plates were designed way back to be readable on the original tablets which were just 800x600.
I agree re the AIPs being often full of crap but if any trouble blows up, the AIP will be thrown at you for sure. And one finds some strange stuff in there... for example if you go to Pontoise, you get assigned a SID which is not published. It turns out to be a SID for Le Bourget! There is actually a one-liner in the Pontoise AIP saying this, but Jepp missed it totally (I did report it to them). Apparently it is not unheard of to do this and use another airport for the same city or area, but I counted the number of pages published for the Paris airports and it comes to about 400. OK if you are electronic but it's about 15mm of paper otherwise.
Where do Jepp get the data for German airports, if not the German AIP plates?
However this still leaves the job of collecting airport contact info.
Internet? I find myself using the web much more than the AIPs. AIPs are from a time where telex was used for remote information transmissions. I hardly ever need the AIP for anything. For a lot of countries, the AIP is just a formal ICAO requirement and written by some student with lots of BS in it. Once written the job is done, no updates required.
Re the AIP terminal charts, I think the practice of the Euro CAAs to not publish directly usable MDA etc figures is very bad. I once asked the head of UK CAA charting why they do that and his reply was that they are not in the business of competing with commercial providers (meaning Jeppesen, of course). I don't understand that, because surely Jepp don't pay them money for commercial access to the AIP.
I was told the OCH vs MDA was an ICAO requirement, Jeppesen is non standard there. The German VFR charts are very nicely done but that's because they're only available for money. Jeppesen do not use them to create theirs, you can see that because Jeppesen don't pick up changes unless the airport informs them (in addition to the CAA). Also for IFR, Jeppesen isn't completely automatic either. About 4 months ago, Egypt changed some courses on charts (due to variation) which Jeppesen until today have not picked up.
Re the AIP terminal charts, I think the practice of the Euro CAAs to not publish directly usable MDA etc figures is very bad. I once asked the head of UK CAA charting why they do that and his reply was that they are not in the business of competing with commercial providers (meaning Jeppesen, of course). I don't understand that, because surely Jepp don't pay them money for commercial access to the AIP.
Or do they?
Re Skydemon, I guess they must get their data from the same place as everybody else i.e. Eurocontrol and the national AIPs. I once asked them (in a forum) where it comes from and the reply was "stone tablets" so clearly they are not so keen to go into detail, which is understandable.
Navbox get it from the AIPs (they told me).
IFR data is much easier than VFR data, because the airway database is free. What is not free however is SIDs/STARs, and that has incidentally screwed up the people who developed the Eurocontrol autorouting apps. Also the Eurocontrol database doesn't include various little things like airway junctions where there is no published intersection name. Maybe they changed this recently but basically their database just used lat/long (as a text string) for that - bizzare.
However this still leaves the job of collecting airport contact info. A lot of AIPs are good for that (UK, France, Germany) but a lot are very poor. The Greek AIP was always so bad that almost nobody read it, and e.g. airport opening hours would be continuously notamed.
I don't know how they do it, but SkyDemon planning tool / moving map uses a good VFR database that is updated regularly. They've included also airways recently.
