In the endless quest to shed weight on passenger flights, Qantas has today decided to ditch all of its 20 kilo flight books and instead replace them with 64GB iPads across the fleet.
Qantas prints a staggering 18,000 pages of charts, schedules, manuals and forms everyday, and the introduction of iPads will see the airline shed 3000 pages off of its daily printing total.
The devices will be loaded with custom apps from Qantas for use on domestic and international flights.
If they’re approved by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority, pilots will get the iPads by September.
Telstra is the one supplying the iPads to Qantas and the airline has cut a deal to use the Next G network when in Australia and something that Telstra is calling its “global Wi-Fi partner network” when overseas.
I wonder if they’ll have to turn the devices off during taxi, take-off and landing to comply with the world’s stupidest aviation regulations?