With the holiday travel season in full swing, airline pilots used to lugging heavy bags full of paper flight manuals can finally take a load off — thanks to the iPad and other tablet devices.
Three major US airlines have announced plans to equip their pilots with more fashionable and — even more important — far lighter tablets in place of the traditional paper manuals, which can weigh upward of 50 pounds.
And experts predict the move to mobile devices will mark the start of a major trend in modern air travel.
“We’re at the tipping point,” said airline consultant Bob Mann, who predicts 90 percent of major airlines will make the switch to electronic flight bags in the next five years.
In June, American Airlines said it had completed a planned rollout that would give all its pilots an iPad in place of their paper charts, making it “the first major commercial airline to fully utilize tablets in all cockpits during all phases of flight.”
Just a few days later, JetBlue revealed that it had received Federal Aviation Administration approval to give all pilots custom-equipped iPads, thereby allowing them to toss their heavy paper manuals.
More recently, Delta Air Lines said in September that it’s also in the process of equipping its 11,000 pilots with Microsoft’s Surface tablets by the end of 2014.
“We’ve done things the same way my entire life. This is a fundamental change in how we do business,” said Capt. Tom Staigle, a pilot with Delta.
“We have pilots who get hurt” because of the heavy flight bags, which weigh an average of 38 pounds, he added.