United Airlines and Continental Airlines pilots will soon be able to ditch their hefty paper flight manuals in favor of electronic flight bags, accessible via an iPad app. By the end of the year, United will have rolled out 11,000 iPads to all of its pilots, the company announced Tuesday.
“The paperless flight deck represents the next generation of flying,” United’s senior vice president of flight operations Fred Abbott said in a statement. “The introduction of iPads ensures our pilots have essential and real-time information at their fingertips at all times throughout the flight.”
A traditional flight bag, which contains operating manuals, navigation charts, handbooks, checklists, logbooks, and weather information, weighs about 38 pounds and contains an average of 12,000 pieces of paper. By contrast, the iPad weighs less than a pound and a half, and the devices United plans to use in its cockpits come pre-loaded with all of this information condensed into the Jeppesen Mobile FliteDeck app.
The app includes full-color “interactive, data-driven enroute navigation information and worldwide geo-referenced terminal charts," United said.
EFBs are environmentally friendly; United expects to save around 16 million sheets of paper a year as well as 326,000 gallons of jet fuel by cutting out excess weight. United also claims going paperless will be safer, taking away the need for pilots to flip through thousands of pages during flights, and reducing the risk of injury as they won’t have to schlep heavy flight bags anymore.
United is following the lead of a number of airlines that have already embraced iPads in the air. Alaska Airlines was the first commercial airline to make the switch to paperless flight manuals through an iPad app. American Airlines and Delta Airlines have also made the change. In related news, last week British Airways gave its flight attendants iPads equipped with passenger information to enhance customer service in the air.