Paperless planes inch closer to reality

Multifunction digital technologies help clean up cockpits.

The digital revolution was once expected to create a paperless society, but that transition fell prey to PC and other technologies that make it simple to print ever more documents. In the airplane cockpit, however, digital technologies are indeed erasing the need for bulky paper documents.

The electronic flight bag (EFB), which digitizes charts and other pilot data that used to be carried in an actual bag, is being built into a growing number of planes. Class 3 and Class 2 EFBs, which are permanently mounted and retrofitted onto legacy aircraft, are slowly displacing the handheld Class 1 EFBs that are now in common use.