Sri Lankan Airlines introduces ipads in cockpits, to go paperless

CHENNAI: Sri Lankan Airlines today introduced ipads in cockpits to replace bulky paper manuals on its Airbus A340, A330 and A320 aircraft.
The airline has become the first in Asia to get regulatory authorisation to use ipads in cockpit after Civil Aviation Authority of Sri Lanka (CAASL) permitted the airline to switch to electronic flight bag (EFB).
Ipad based EFB is an information management device that displays data intended primarily for flight-deck or cabin use.
Though pilots across different airlines have started to use ipads in an informal manner to refer to charts and manuals, many countries in the region including India have not given permission to their airlines to make cockpits fully paperless.
The ‘green’ benefits of using iPad EFBs are also immense as there will be a drastic reduction in the use of thousands of sheets of paper and printing. iPad EFB usage will save approximately 264,000 gallons of jet fuel and in turn reduce tons of emissions.
Sri Lankan airlines has selected the electronic flight bag solution available for iPad from Fokker Services in the Airbus A320's, A330's and A340's and will progressively introduce Airbus FlySmart Software to calculate aircraft performance and to refer all manuals. SriLankan will also use the Jeppeson FliteDeck Pro to refer charts.
Pilots no longer need to lug 84 kilograms of paper manuals from aircraft to aircraft and from airport to airport and flip through pages, when the data is now streamlined for easy electronic searching. Sri Lankan flights UL 205 bound for Muscat today became the first flight to be operated utilising iPad Class 1 electronic flight bag.
“SriLankan has taken the lead in Asia to revolutionise the flight deck, realising the vision of paperless flying and becoming Asia’s first airline to fly with iPad EFBs” said SriLankan’s chairman, Nishantha Wickremasinghe. “The process will make flying much easier, more efficient, accurate and greatly help the airline’s bottom line, as millions of rupees will be saved” said SriLankan’s Chief Executive Officer, Kapila Chandrasena.
iPad EFB usage will also reduce weight and paper clutter in the cockpit, reduce fuel usage due to more accurate takeoff and landing, weight and balance calculations, improved safety with on-board performance calculations, ability to increase payload with real time performance calculations, improved route decisions, and in the whole process, save aircraft engine lifetime.
By end October 2012, the entire technical flight crew of approximately 300 pilots will be using the iPad EFBs in the all Airbus fleet of A340s, A330s and A320 aircraft.
The ‘green’ benefits of using iPad EFBs are also immense as there will be a drastic reduction in the use of thousands of sheets of paper and printing. iPad EFB usage will save approximately 264,000 gallons of jet fuel and in turn reduce tons of emissions.