Summit Corporate Profile and History
In business since
1990 as a pioneer in aviation information technology, Summit Aviation was
the first to electronically publish FAA publications. Since then, the
Computerized Aviation Reference Library has grown dramatically in both
content and capability to include over 1,000 publications, equivalent to
over 35,000 pages and thousands of illustrations, including FARs, Advisory
Circulars, Airworthiness Directives, and numerous handbooks. The Library
is updated monthly to include the latest changes and updates to regulatory
information.
Most importantly,
the Library is contained within a single file, on a single CD, that
is fully-searchable across all documents simultaneously, or within a
specific set of most relevant publications. Used extensively throughout the
U.S. and internationally, our customers include corporate flight
departments, numerous federal agencies such as the FAA and NTSB,
manufacturers, flight schools, private pilots, safety specialists, and all
major airlines.
Summit’s first
product was the Computerized FAR/AIM. It contained fully searchable
electronic versions of the text of 14 CFR parts 1, 61, 67, and 91 (still
known informally as FARs, for Federal Aviation Regulations)
and the Airman’s Information Manual (AIM). Media was three 5 1/4 inch
floppies or three 3 1/2 inch diskettes.
We first
demonstrated the product at the October 1990 AOPA Convention in Palm
Springs, California. At the convention we received many requests for a
product that comprised all the eighty-plus sections of Title 14 CFR, Chapter
I, and not just the small subset included on the original computerized
FAR/AIM.
As soon as we
returned from the convention we began work on the Professional Version.
This product included all the parts of 14 CFR Chapter I requiring nine high
density 3 1/2 inch diskettes.
Fortunately,
CD-ROMs began to become very popular and we sold our first CD-ROM in
November 1993. Now that the problem of having to distribute potentially
dozens of diskettes was solved, we pressed forward to add many additional
publications and, for the first time, were able to add thousands of
illustrations.
For the first few
years, we continued to add FAA publications to our growing Computerized
Aviation Reference Librar. But the novelty of having these documents in
electronic form, many of which had never before been available to the public
except in paper, began to erode because of the growth of the internet.
The novelty wore
off but the Library on CD remained popular because it provided better
access to the information. Paradoxically, the advantage of having a
thousand publications on a single CD had the potential to make finding a
specific piece of information more difficult - the needle in a hay stack
problem. Our focus then turned from collecting and digitizing tens of
thousands of pages of information to devising a system to better organize
and present this information. The culmination of this effort was the
introduction, at the EAA Convention in July of 2000 of the Query Wizard.
Summit Aviation
continues today as a leader in electronic delivery of pertinent, updated
regulatory information to the aviation community.
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