April 3, 2015: The kingdom of Bahrain's flagship carrier Gulf Air rolls out a new kit for their pilots what they describe as 'Electronic Flight Bag'. This service was announced last year by the company.
This allows pilots to use iPad loaded with essential flight documents instead of carrying paper-based materials. Usually pilots has to carry heavy flight bags containing flight plans, aircraft manuals and navigational charts as formal requirement to complete the journey. The introduction of Electronic flight bag reduces the carriers's cost of printing by almost 50% and made pilot's lives a bit easier.
Dr Jassim Haji, Director of IT at Gulf Air, said to itp.net in his statement: "Those paper-based manuals are heavy, very time consuming to update and maintain, and costly," He further adds, "The pilots also need navigational charts as part of the flying process, which are traditionally printed on large papers. These are not easy to use in the small cockpit. Essentially, these traditional approaches for using paper-based materials are not convenient, and such heavy materials burn more fuel."
While other airlines buy the services like this from third party companies, Gulf Air build and developed electronic flight bag in-house, so that it could be totally integrated with the airline's infrastructure.
According to Dr Haji, the project succeeded in making pilots' lives easier. And Gulf has serious financial gains with this move, he explains. The airline has seen a 50% saving on printing costs- around 500,000 sheets per year, amounting to $1.5 million.
Read the full case study on this deployment in the April 1st issue of Arabian Computer News.
Source: itp.net
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