Earlier today, American Airlines announced that the company has completed its Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) implementation, making it the first major commercial airline to deploy EFB throughout its fleet. Along with this deployment, the company is not only discontinuing paper revisions to terminal charts, but will also be replacing over 35 lbs of paper-based manuals and various materials that the pilots have been carrying in each flight. This will enable the company to not only be greener with eliminating 24 million pages of paper but will also help its bottomline by saving $1.2 million of annual fuel costs.
After getting FAA’s approval to use Apple’s iPad in all of the airline’s current fleet types and during all phases of flights, the company deployed over 8,000 iPads. Mobile software that the devices will be running is provided by Jeppesen, a unit of Boeing Digital Aviation. The FAA-approved Mobile Terminal Chart application by Jeppesen is allowed to be used from gate-to-gate throughout all phases of flights. Jeppesen has been serving the aviation market with its mobile EFB solutions - Mobile FliteDeck VFR, Mobile FliteDeck and FliteDeck Pro and has been partnering with organizations like AirWatch for an optional MDM capability in order to provide a complete solution to its customers. These solutions not only allow pilots to access and navigate terminal charts but also help them save time in getting updates. Other commercial airlines such as Alaska Airlines, United Airlines and Delta Air Lines have also deployed tablets to their fleets, along with large business jet fleet operators like NetJets, Flexjet and Flight Options.
The approval to use EFBs throughout all phases of the flight will likely attract more commercial airlines to fully deploy a solution. Especially with airlines like JetBlue that already have in-flight WiFi deployed, enabling them to send real time updates to pilots around weather and document updates,
replacing paper manuals with EFB programs would allow the pilots to be much more efficient while performing their duties in a secured manner.
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