There was a time when the compleat pilot needed to maintain a subscription to the FAA’s Airport/Facility Directory in addition to sectionals, instrument charts and approach plates. The electronic flight bag application running on a cellphone or tablet has all but made the paper versions of these charts obsolete, yet a pilot sometimes needed to, say, choose a preferred route, look up a phone number or decode an abbreviation. That information was either missing from a typical EFB’s available charts or was a separate download. Regardless, it often wasn’t easy to find.
In 2016, the FAA renamed the A/FD to the Chart Supplement, but didn’t appreciably alter its contents. Now, according to an August announcement that expands on a note printed on each publication’s cover, the agency has undertaken the Chart Supplement Revision Plan, which “will eliminate redundant, duplicative and conflicting aeronautical information across the agency.” The FAA is cleaning up aeronautical chart supplements as part of an overall effort to modernize aeronautical information. It’s also working on modernizing the Notam system, as Congress requested in 2018 legislation (see the following news item).
