United Airlines Invests in 11,000 iPads
All United and Continental pilots will be armed with iPads before the year is out.
Apple just this year replaced all of the paper signage across its Apple Stores with iPads and now it seems another major company has decided to take a portion of its business the paperless route.
United Airlines this week announced that it will adopt a paperless flight deck and distribute 11,000 iPads to United and Continental pilots as part of a new electronic flight bag scheme. United said in a statement that the electronic flight bags (EFB) will replace paper flight manuals, and, a first for major network carriers, provide pilots with paperless aeronautical navigational charts through a special iPad app, Jeppesen Mobile FliteDeck.
"The paperless flight deck represents the next generation of flying," said Captain Fred Abbott, United's senior vice president of flight operations. "The introduction of iPads ensures our pilots have essential and real-time information at their fingertips at all times throughout the flight."
A conventional flight bag full of paper materials contains an average of 12,000 sheets of paper per pilot. United says that each 1.5 iPad will replace 38 pounds of paper operating manuals, navigation charts, reference handbooks, flight checklists, logbooks and weather information in a pilot's flight bag.
"The green benefits of moving to EFBs are two-fold—it significantly reduces paper use and printing, and, in turn, reduces fuel consumption," United said in a statement. "The airline projects EFBs will save nearly 16 million sheets of paper a year which is equivalent to more than 1,900 trees not cut down. Saving 326,000 gallons of jet fuel a year reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 3,208 metric tons."
Distribution of the iPads began earlier this month, with all pilots expected to have them by the end of 2011.
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They will have several ipad as backup right? Wouldn't trust any electronic hardware to do with flying without redundancy.
of course not, whats the problem with entrusting everyones safety to a $499 device with a consumer OS that may or may not function reliably over the long term in a pressurised environment.
I would be bad if a flight would be limited to only one pad, the co-pilot should have his own, mirroring the pilot's information, the engineer should also have his with the same information as the pilot plus his own data.
They better make sure they turn them off before and during flight, or lese it will mess up the navigation guidance system..... Oh Wait.....
Nothing bad about hardware, but nothing great neither. Maybe they should test for reliability. Test the circuit, the battery, it could maybe someday after years of use start a fire.
About the OS, I think it should be MANDATORY RTOS. Not some _iOS_pretty_and_shinny_look_how_great_angry_birds_it_plays
Somehow I doubt the green benefits. So the Ipad is "free" to produce?
More importantly is battery life, stolen property and above all thats bugging me:
DO AIRCRAFT HAVE CIGARETTE LIGHTER POWER SOCKETS IN THE COCKPITS TO RECHARGE THINGS WITH!?!?!??!!??
This is scary. Airlines purchasing a device for pilots to read manuals in with no user replaceable batteries and lacking connectivity. They would have done much better getting an Android tablet like the Toshiba Thrive.
...plane crashes...so what were you doing...i was playing on my pad...stupid i tell you....they need to invest in more legroom not iPads...
of course not, whats the problem with entrusting everyones safety to a $499 device with a consumer OS that may or may not function reliably over the long term in a pressurised environment.
planes are pressurized to what we normally have on the surface.
and if its just looking at pictures, and reading, the ipad can more or less be trusted with that, and worse come to worse, you have trained pilots and radios and radar for a reason.
They better make sure they turn them off before and during flight, or lese it will mess up the navigation guidance system..... Oh Wait.....
this is largely a myth, but some instruments ARE effected by that kind of equipment. however out of 10 phones, only 1 may screw with 1 dial, you blanket the ban on everything just to make it easier to regulate, and not have to be knowledgeable of 1000+ types of phones.
More importantly is battery life, stolen property and above all thats bugging me
an external battery that can keep it going for 24+ hours shouldn't be to hard to acquire/make.
all that said, they are doing away with 418000lbs of material.
and lets say it costs 10$ per 200 pages, thats 600$ a book, the ipad actually payed for itself. in multiple ways.
Whoa whoa whoa. Let's not get hasty! You can't drop a manual and render it useless. A coffee spill is likewise no biggie. A lot of places still use paper because it's extremely dependable. Use the iPads fine, but I'd feel more comfortable if there was hardcopy backup.
this is so stupid they are still using paper they could of began using at least notebook computers 10 years ago. nothing revolutionary about the ipad.
This is a positive step forward for this legacy airline. Fortunately for my airline, JetBlue, we've had a totally paperless flight deck FOR ELEVEN YEARS!!!! Only it isn't iPads...it's laptops, yup, full-blown, fully-functional, very capable laptop computers....FOR ELEVEN YEARS!!!! The industry has kinda caught up to JetBlue and now it's time for JetBlue to take it to another level. Standby folks, the techno war will heat up.
....The Great Eduardo
I don't think that's such a good idea replacing reliable paper with an iPad. What if the iPad's data gets corrupted?
They better make sure they turn them off before and during flight, or lese it will mess up the navigation guidance system..... Oh Wait.....[citation]
Well, at least we now know that iPads can be safwly used throughout the flight.
[nom]steelbox[/nom]I would be bad if a flight would be limited to only one pad, the co-pilot should have his own, mirroring the pilot's information, the engineer should also have his with the same information as the pilot plus his own data.
That and make sure that the iPads and their batteries come from different production lots in the same aircraft.[/citation]
I wonder how much faster it is to search for a particular piece of information on an electronic device like an iPad than to find that same info among 12000 sheets of paper? Might be a pretty decent time saver in emergencies where every second counts?
I would be bad if a flight would be limited to only one pad, the co-pilot should have his own, mirroring the pilot's information, the engineer should also have his with the same information as the pilot plus his own data.
There are no more engineers on most flights, grandpa.
So, if the pilots are using these during take off and landing, do I have to turn off mine? Are they going to say "You must now turn off all electronic items......except for ipads." This is so stupid that they have you do this. Can this double standard be any more hypocritical?
Is it possible that these aren't truly off-the-shelf iPads and have some kind of extra EM shielding or whatever to ensure that they don't interfere with the cockpit instruments?
This is scary. Airlines purchasing a device for pilots to read manuals in with no user replaceable batteries and lacking connectivity. They would have done much better getting an Android tablet like the Toshiba Thrive.
Just because you are a pilot, doesn't mean you are tech savvy... Having the battery NOT user replaceable prevents idiot pilots from fiddling with it. And in a corporate environment, the less connectivity the better: You don't want some idiot pilot plugging in his USB flash-drive to watch some movies while on autopilot, only to find out it has a virus that causes that pad to freeze...
As far as being a pressurized environment: I'd be more worried how they would react in an UNPRESSURIZED environment. Earth is pressurized at sea level... It is rapid decompression which might cause the iPad screens to pop out of their aluminum frame...
Hmm weight save = 38lbs..... average american passenger is obese so wherew is the saving ? What about if they ipad runs out of charge ???
This is not news in so many ways, Other Airlines have already done this (Alska, American etc)...
It is news for United, and a slew of Toms readers. ;-)
Pilot: can someone draw the blinds i have trouble reading whats on page 256 because of the glare.......
Not sure what everyone's paranoia is. Sure it is not the most cost effective device they could have gone with (especially as they will have to replace the whole device in 3 years when the battery is shot), but it would be more convenient to look something up by a search as opposed to thumbing through a book in the event of a problem. They should keep the paper copy around, just in case something happens to the tech. all you need is one good bump of turbulence to knock something out, paper is more durable in those situations.
"Hmm weight save = 38lbs..... average american passenger is obese so where is the saving ? "
What does one have to do with the other?? And why just Americans? There are plenty of other countries in the same neighborhood... http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/ [...] ld-is-fat/
"What about if they ipad runs out of charge ???"
(1) I assume that the pilot isn't flipping through his 12000 pages of documentation for the entire flight. My impression is that they know most of what they need to to take off, get where they are going and land without looking anything up. Since the iPad has a standby time of like 30 days and a run time of around 10 hours [probably more when it is just reading documents, not playing games, movies, music, etc], then how likely is it that they're going to kill a battery on a single flight or even a full days worth of flights?
(2) Who really thinks that there is not a single place to charge an electrical device anywhere within the cockpit of a commercial airplane? A USB port, DC or AC outlet is all you'd need.
That would defeat the purpose though, right? Fuel savings gone [actually increased since now you are adding a couple pounds worth of extra gear] and also no savings in terms of money or the environmental aspects with cutting out the huge amount of paper they are using.
Since I am about 98% positive [not a pilot and never been in a modern cockpit] that there would be no problem powering the device using AC, DC or USB somewhere in the cockpit -- who says they EVER have to depend on the batteries?
Are the pilots going to be physically carrying them around, or are they physically mounting them in the cockpit? If they are, benefit one is that it would then be really convenient to hard wire it somewhere. Benefit two, far less likely to be damaged from being dropped.
If they will just be using like a tablet-- then perhaps the biggest concern would be theft...
They will have several ipad as backup right? Wouldn't trust any electronic hardware to do with flying without redundancy.
A friend of mine, who flies for a German airline, has a laptop (Sony or Lenovo - can't remember) in the cockpit. Redundancy is achieved by having both pilot and co-polit equipped with a laptop.
they apparently didn't know they could get 11,000 galaxy tabs or another tablet cheaper. someone needs to tell them about that apple tax
If it was an iPad1 I'd pass but the screen's so nice on them, much better than curled bits of paper flying around a cockpit. The screen is much clearer than the instrument panels. Surely HP should make a counterbid and offer 11,000 Touchpads at $99 and start an airline bidding war. Will we see reduced ticket prices. I think not. Stewardesses dig the iPads too.
This is why these airlines are losing money. If they want an electronics device for the purpose of replacing manuals, they'd be better off with an a proper e-reader that can last months on a charge and has better contrast for reading (heaven forbid we get an inexperienced pilot with a dead-battery iPad). Instead, they spend 2-4 times as much on iPads to grab media attention. BTW, this isn't going green: you're dishing out more "green" backs then needed and you're buying from a company that has one of the worst environmental records of any large tech company.
What's the probability you'll be hearing the sounds of Angry Birds coming from the cockpit the next time you use the toilet at the front of the plane?
"they apparently didn't know they could get 11,000 galaxy tabs or another tablet cheaper. someone needs to tell them about that apple tax"
So, you know how much both the iPad and GalaxyTab cost in terms of bulk pricing? Their BoMs are about the same, so I imagine both companies are capable of selling them in bulk at comparable prices.