When Jim Dexter suits up to fly Eureka, one of the three Zeppelin airships in the world, he tucks iPhone into his pocket. It’s his go-to device for flight planning, weather reports, and keeping in touch with the ground crew. “It’s a huge leap in technology,” he says.
Dexter brings over 30 years of flight experience to his job as Director of Operations for Airship Ventures, a young California company founded by husband-and-wife team Brian and Alexandra Hall. In the heart of Silicon Valley, the Halls have introduced a little bit of adventure: a giant airship that makes tours around the San Francisco Bay.
In the air and in the office, Airship Ventures turns to iPhone for almost every aspect of their business. For the pilots, it begins with flight planning using aviation apps downloaded from the App Store. “I can pull up sectional charts,” Dexter says. “If I hear that we have a new operational requirement to go to, say, Long Beach, I can pull up the map for Long Beach on the iPhone. And that helps me plan the trip.”
Weather reports, of course, are mission-critical for flight. “I use AeroWeather to access aviation weather forecasting on the iPhone,” Dexter says. “It’s important to know what the wind is doing each hour.” His weather app also gives him the Terminal Area Forecast, a wind report for any airfield he might be flying into. “That’s extremely useful for a Zeppelin pilot.”
To help operate the Zeppelin, Dexter uses iConvert, an application that can toggle between metric and English measurements. “The Zeppelin is a European aircraft, and the figures are in metric,” he says. “With iConvert, I can go from kilograms to pounds and inches of mercury to millibars.”
Full Story: Apple
