Avionics News May 2014 - 22

Meanwhile, private and business pilots flying under Part
91 - excepting Subpart K for fractional operations - experimented in the vacuum of any regulatory entanglements
The original concept: A paperless cockpit
under the Class 1 EFB guidelines of advisory circular.
(at least where charts and plates
Software authors and publishers found their first sucwere concerned)
cesses on tablet computers, and avionics makers started
The invention of the EFB began with ambitions of reoffering portable GPS navigators with databases of the
moving pounds of paper from the standard kit of pilots ...
entire U.S. airport, airways and navigation network inforinitially, that is. The cockpit equipment of many airliners
mation. These moving-map GPS devices typically did not
started providing rudimentary charting solutions almost as
include instrument plates.
soon as the first flight management
But it wasn't long before the IFR
system emerged with their own mem(instrument flight rules) documents
ory banks loaded with the particulars
found their way onto oversize porTO DA Y ' S E F B
of SIDs, STARS and the full inventory
table GPS navigators with approachof published instrument approaches.
plate-size display screens. The modFU NCT I O NA L I T Y H A S
Rudimentary, because these early
ern EFB began to emerge with funcFA R S U R PA S S E D T H E
"moving maps" showed nothing
tions beyond those initially imagined
more than waypoints of procedures,
- and growing.
O R I G I NA L P RO M I S E
with no landscape details and, in
Garmin, Honeywell and several othO F T H E NO -PA P E R some cases, no consistent scale.
er avionics companies launched their
The downside of this initial adCHA RT S CO CK P I T I NTO
own takes on the EFB, with Garmin's
vance toward the paperless cockpit
695/696 and the BendixKing AV8OR
NO -PA P E R -I N -CO C K P I T
stemmed from both practical considseries raising the bar in EFB functionalTO O L S , D E L I V E R I NG
erations and regulatory inertia: the
ity and utility.
FAA still required charts and plates
And then, along came the iPad in the
MU LT I P L E F U NC T I O NS
"appropriate for the flight planned."
spring of 2010, and a number of vendors
I N A D D I T I O N TO
For the professional aware of
at the Sun 'n Fun Fly-In showed off their
the vagaries of weather, air traffic
first swipes at EFB software for the tabTH E I R O R I G I NA L E F B
management and corporate dispatch
let. From there, the pace of development
CA PA B I L I T I E S .
practices, this meant carrying the
quickened, as Apple, in sequence, unwhole country in that box of leather
leashed frequent iPad updates.
called a chart case, used to carry the
For pilots, the variety of software and
thousands of pieces of paper covering the whole country.
hardware accessories has grown to staggering proportions, with
Imagine, the thinking went, an electronic device small
the iPad and some non-Apple devices capable of running navienough to fit into a briefcase. Scanned charts could look
gation, weather-data, synthetic vision and motion-sensing softgood; charts captured to employ vector scaling could look
ware - in essence making the properly equipped EFB a tool for
great at any size.
terrain and traffic safety, navigation, weather avoidance, and a
The first practical EFBs were, in effect, homemade
standby to the standard six pack of a glass cockpit.
packages, some by air carriers who used notebooks as
the hardware and specialized, custom-authored software
What a fast, strange twist it's been
to deliver the specific functions the carriers wanted their
As noted earlier, today's EFB-functioning tablets can
pilots to use. Flight planning, for example, generally ocserve as a legal, practical solution for a valid, accurate
curs at the dispatcher level at most carriers; the notebookweather briefing, a channel for filing the flight plan, a
based EFBs gave pilots an alternative to the pages of
pilot operating handbook and a facilities directory while
dot-matrix-printed paper pilots previously output before
sitting still on the ground.
boarding a flight. These initial steps came with Federal
These devices achieve all these specialized aims by
Aviation Administration approval in the Part 121, 125 and
loading and running EFB software that works with sepa135 worlds and approval for Class 2 and Class 3 EFBs.
rate peripheral hardware devices. So useful and flexible

FIVE YEARS IN

Continued from page 21

avionics news

may

2014

Avionics News May 2014

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