With expansion into charting, Garmin maneuvers to become the Apple of aviation

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Garmin is growing its family of aviation products with the introduction of a proprietary navigational chart service dubbed SmartCharts. When taken alongside the company’s dominant presence in the general and business aviation avionics market, the move reflects an Apple-like strategy to offer more integrated services to go with its flying hardware.

SmartCharts wants to be a serious challenger in the chart provider space, which today is dominated by Jeppesen — a service that first debuted in 1934 and is used overwhelmingly by big operators or in larger jet aircraft — as well as basic but free-to-use charts published by civil aviation authorities as a public service.

In a departure from normal chart design, Garmin’s product is designed to be fully interactive. Charts are displayed not as a PDF document within Garmin Pilot, the company’s tablet or laptop-based electronic flight bag (EFB), but instead as a fully interactive system that aims to engineer out many of the pain points associated with standard charts.

Garmin’s broadening strategy comes as Boeing decamps its own position atop aviation’s electronic services industry. The plane maker last month announced a $10.55 billion deal to divest both Jeppesen and EFB maker ForeFlight to software and technology private equity firm Thoma Bravo. It’s a strategic transition Garmin sees as an opportunity — the company’s aviation segment represented just 14% ($877 million) of the company’s $6.3 billion overall revenue in 2024, but the launch of SmartCharts is an effort to grow that piece of the pie and wrest users away from its chief rival. 

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