good-to-know
Electronic flight bag
The old large flight bags have been retired. Weighing 354 grams, the same as an iPad, the new ones open up new possibilities in the cockpit.
11.2015 | 1 mins reading time
– 1 tablet PC instead of 1 flight bag
– 354g instead of 15kg A leather pilot case with wheels can weigh up to 5 kg when empty; once filled with manuals, tables and maps, its weight may be up to 15 kg.
– 64 GB instead of 4,267,000 pages New iPads come with up to 64 GB of memory, which is equivalent to the amount of data contained in somewhat more than four million pages in Word.
For decades, the large, dark-colored cases used by pilots to carry their in-flight documentation were a familiar sight in the aviation world. Filled with performance-calculation tables, countless navigational charts, aircraft operating manuals and other important documents, these cases contained more or less everything the pilot needed to have close at hand in the cockpit to fly the plane. But pilot cases are becoming increasingly rare as more and more airlines replace them with the electronic equivalent: a tablet PC. These electronic flight bags (EFBs) range from modified versions of commercially available tablet devices to custom-made specialist equipment. Although they were introduced primarily to improve information quality and processing speed, EFBs provide a welcome secondary benefit: they are lighter. Without all those manuals, maps and flight documents, the weight can quickly be reduced by several kilos.
