About

Navigation.Cards was started in August 2023 by then-student-pilot Louis Ingenthron in Florida. He found that navigating with modern touch-screens took too much time away from the pilot and prevented them from keeping their eyes on the sky and their instruments. In addition, he found that fiddling with small touch-screens became increasingly difficult and error-prone with the slightest turbulence in small craft. So, he sought a better way. Early navigation cards were 3D-printed, monochromatic, boxy, and lacked their trademark counting nubs on the side. Over the next few months, Louis iterated and improved the design, adding the nubs, making the cards more ergonomic, and adding functional color. But, unlike the computerized navigation systems, the cards could not update themselves. A system was necessary to make sure that pilots could keep their cards up-to-date. So, the Navigation.Cards website was born. Pulling most data from a highly respected automatic API (airportdb.io), and filling in the rest by hand, a system was developed to allow users to request documents with just the airports they needed for printing at a moment's notice. The system could even auto-generate most content without a human's adjustment, allowing it to expand outside of Louis's original coverage area of Florida.