By Kerry Frank October 6, 2025
It has been fun getting out and speaking again. My favorite part is hearing the impact on people’s lives. If you are new here, buckle up. This is going to be a wild ride filled with grit, perseverance, and the story of an unlikely entrepreneur who helped change aviation.
If you are a pilot or a flight attendant, I like to think I played a role in you being able to dump the heavy paper flight bags you once carried. That work opened the door for the tablets you now use every day across countless aviation apps.
When I started, commercial tablets weren’t even on the market yet.
I’ll give you a snippet of the story, but the rest you’ll have to wait for in my book. At that point in aviation history, passengers had to completely turn off their phones during flight. Aviation was caught off guard by the rapid growth of cellular devices. New manufacturers were flooding the market with products so quickly that regulators couldn’t keep up. No one knew whether these devices interfered with cockpit instrumentation. That meant I had a huge hurdle to overcome if I wanted to make flight manuals digital.
I wasn’t an electromagnetic engineer, and I didn’t even know what EMI interference* meant when I first heard of it. But I did know this: when I flew, I noticed many passengers were not turning off their devices, and planes weren’t falling from the sky. That was enough for me to press in further.
Eventually, we arranged a test flight over government airspace with the FAA to prove there would be no EMI issues in the cockpit. We loaded 150 devices on board and brought 18 engineers. My job was to stand in the cockpit doorway of an Embraer 170 and flip digital pages of the flight manual while the pilots performed maneuvers, steep ascents, missed approaches, and rapid turns.
I was confident enough to bring my husband, who was one of the engineers on board, while my three children were safe at home. When the flight ended, the data came back clean. We were ready to celebrate, but regulated industries always bring more hurdles. Looking back, I am thankful I didn’t know how many were still ahead of me. From that test flight, it would take another two years before I signed my first contract with an airline.
In the meantime, our family lived on fifty dollars a week while we kept building and innovating what would become the EFB, the electronic flight bag.
It is easy to hear stories like this and assume success happened overnight. It didn’t. It took years of dedicated people working together to change aviation worldwide. And there I was at the forefront, with no college degree, no background in technology, and no experience in aviation.
People often ask me, “How do you start when you have an idea?” My first advice is simple: dedicate time to it each day. Maybe you spend twenty minutes researching, or talking to people about your idea. If after thirty days you are still excited and energized, then dig deeper. If not, it wasn’t the right idea, so go back to the drawing board and try again.
Because this wasn’t my first idea. It was just the one I never gave up on.
With Gratitude,
~ Kerry
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