> An Electronic Flight Bag, which replaces more than 35 pounds of paper-based reference material and manuals that pilots often carried in their carry-on kitbag, offers numerous benefits for American and its pilots.
> ... removing the kitbag from all of our planes saves a minimum of 400,000 gallons and $1.2 million of fuel annually based on current fuel prices. Additionally, each of the more than 8,000 iPads we have deployed to date replaces more than 3,000 pages of paper previously carried by every active pilot and instructor. Altogether, 24 million pages of paper documents have been eliminated
> ... All American pilots now enjoy the benefits associated with replacing their heavy kitbags – one of the airline's biggest sources of pilot injuries – with a 1.35-pound iPad. The digital format also requires less time to update each of the six or more paper manuals found in each pilot's kitbag, as manual paper revisions take hours to complete every month, compared to the minutes it takes for electronic updates.
Paper comprises an entire suitcase. Charts, airport docs, aircraft manuals, maint logs, regulations, etc etc. Updates are frequent and also paper. The fuel savings alone from not carrying the paper is substantial. As long as there's a backup tablet, it should be okay. If they get lost they can always call in for vectors.
One of the first things I was taught in a freshman CIT class was "Don't forget about paper! It has its place!" Not saying pilots should have to carry around heavy paper charts...but yeah.
And in the old days, the old paper airline tickets were printed on little carbon paper ticket books. As I remember it, the airline would tear out one copy "coupon" from the ticket for each segment that you flew before issuing your boarding pass.
But paper tickets are pretty much unheard of now days, and I don't think airlines are using much carbon paper.
The real reasons they're still around at airports are probably:
1. Compatible with the airline's ancient software and terminals
2. Small size relative to laser printers, can be integrated in to the airline gate/ticket desk "furniture"
3. Highly reliable, and doesn't need expensive consumables. Just need to replace the ink ribbon maybe once a year or so
4. Can print one line at a time if necessary as a sort of ledger/manifest, such as for each passenger who's checked in, and you can tear off whatever's already been printed whenever it's needed
I caught a snippet of his comments, complaining about managing "thousands of flights" using "slips of paper".
It's been a few years, but I recall reading at least one article wherein was described how those slips of paper actually made a lot of sense. (It may have been one of the articles that made the rounds, describing the surprising endurance and resilience of paper-based work.)
The slips of paper supported both regular and immediate, ad hoc workflows as they were needed. Also, paper is immune to systems failures. Your electronic board goes down -- you still have all your flights at hand. Start spacing them and shoving incoming traffic into wider holding patterns.
There seem to be a lot of people theorizing that it could be something about the paper itself that they're looking for, i.e. flash paper, paper circuits or physical one-time encryption pads, but what if it's not about the paper at all? Maybe, the TSA is simply trying to discourage passengers from traveling with or using paper, thereby encouraging people to store their information digitally on phones and laptops where that data can be more easily copied and analyzed?
Why in 2015 are we flying paper half-way around the world?
Doesn't Amazon (and others) have a print-on-demand service that would be more cost effective and not waste the fuel of flying 20lbs of paper across an ocean?
There is more than simply preferential reasons to keep paper around. Some of them were touched on by the article:
* Paper does not run out of battery. On a ship where you need to be able to navigate whether or not the computer fails, this is a feature. My brother-in-law tells a story of when he was an air traffic controller in the military. Every so often they told them they had to turn off their computers and navigate the pilots in the air using paper to make sure they knew how to do it in case the computers failed and the power turned off.
* Paper cannot be hacked. In the article, Russian intelligence and MI5 were mentioned, as well as paper prescriptions. Of all highly secure mediums, paper is the most convenient.
* Paper is just handy. I use it right now to print out knitting patterns and write notes on them. I don't have to find some app to annotate the pattern I can just write directly on the paper. For what it is, paper is the default because it is so fully featured.
Yep, same paper, same reason. Paper isn't any better than before. And you're making the same "I don't understand" reply, despite someone responding to you last time with the answer.
I once took a sheet off an A0 flip-chart at my dad's job, and tried to make the biggest paper plane i'd ever seen. It didn't work at all - it was too flimsy, and just collapsed. The paper would have needed to be thicker as well as bigger!
The premise that paper requires less servers is odd, in my opinion. Documents come from servers anyway, the main difference is whether they go to your printer or your screen.
The paper itself is another problem with modern boarding passes. I miss the old-style boarding passes (the kind you'd find a magnetic strip on), when they were printed on thick cardstock (that wouldn't rip if you put them in a pocket or in between the pages of your passport) and not the thin and squicky BPA-infused thermal paper that almost rips on its own.
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