I see a second major airline has now made the decision to switch their pilots’ heavy flight manuals and books, over to the iPad. First it was announced they were dumping paper flight manuals in favor of electronic documents stored and delivered via the iPad. Now, I’ve just read that United Airlines are also going down this route – and Continental too as the two airlines merged last year – in an effort to reduce costs. The article mentions that the switch to using 11,000 iPads across their airlines, translates to saving 16 million sheets of paper each year and 1.2 million litres of fuel, with the lighter load! The flight manuals, maps and other on-board materials weigh in at 17kg while the ipad comes in at an impressive 0.7kg.

We also have an international airline using Litmos who has the same intention of rolling out on an online learning program and document storage repository to their entire crew for on-the-go learning from mobile phone or iPad. This is looking to become an industry trend and it will be interesting to see how many more follow suit and how quickly mobile learning becomes the new norm for the airline industry.

@Schnicker