American Airlines completes roll out of iPad flight bags to all cockpits

After completing testing and replacing traditional flight bags with iPads for some of its fleet, American Airlines today becomes the first commercial airline to transition to paperless cockpits in all of its aircrafts:

American Airlines has completed the successful rollout of its industry-leading Electronic Flight Bag program with the discontinuation of paper revisions to terminal charts, making it the first major commercial airline to fully utilize tablets in all cockpits during all phases of flight. In April, American completed testing on its Boeing 757 and 767 aircraft and has secured FAA approval to use the Apple iPad on all of its current fleet types – Boeing 777, 767, 757, 737 and MD-80.

Some of the benefits according to American Airlines: minimum savings of 400,000 gallons and $1.2 million of fuel annually in addition to the removal of 3,000 pages of paper carried by pilots. That’s around 24 million pages of paper replaced total with the over 8,000 iPads the airline has deployed.

The press release also notes that American Eagle will become the first regional airline to adopt the iPad flight bags starting July 10.