By JOHN HOFHEIMER
Leader senior staff writer
It’s cheaper, lighter, faster and more efficient to provide 16,000 iPads to C-130, C-5 and other Air Mobility Command aircrews than to continue to load them down with maps, manuals and documents, according to Maj. Pete Birchenough, project manager for the Electronic Flight Bag, and the transition is complete.
“Electronic flight bags allow our aircrews the ability to accomplish the mission more effectively, safely and efficiently with a single touch of their tablet. It’s another example of how we are continuing to find ways to be good stewards of taxpayer money by being innovative and efficient,” said Col. Brian Robinson, 19th Airlift Wing commander.
A “pilot” project was launched at Little Rock Air Force base in July 2012, and a thorough study found that fuel, paper and printing savings more than offset the cost of the iPads, which were bought at a slight discount from Apple.
“We looked at dozens of devices,” according to Birchenough. They had to be fast and secure, and the transition was made more difficult in an otherwise Microsoft environment, he said.
“The biggest single tech hurdle was that our security people were unfamiliar (with Apple). There was unbelievable resistance.
“This is primarily an entertainment device and we were trying to use it as a war-fighting device,” he said of the iPad.
The spreadsheet used to prove the economy of the switch had about 65,000 lines of data, he said.
Air Mobility crews update and swap out documents and maps every 28 days.
Travis Air Force Base alone throws out 30 shopping carts of those documents every two months, he said.
The project was nominated for a Chief of Staff Air Excellence Award.
“It saves heads down time in the cockpit,” with crewmen looking for, and down at, maps and documents.” It’s all in one spot,” he said. And its easier to search for “engine fire” on an iPad than to looks through thousands of pages at a critical moment.
Air Force units had begun migrating to digital libraries, but there was no standard,” Birchenough said. Now it has 900 documents accessible anywhere in the world and managed by one person,” he said.
This is blazing the way for the Air Force and it opens the door for other initiatives.
Birchenough said his group was working now with all the services to improve data handling, plus the Department of Energy.
Little Rock received 721 iPads on July 2, 2012 for a six-month trial period.
A publication bag can weigh anywhere from 60 to 80 pounds, according to Master Sgt. Brandon Bowers, a 19th Operations Group evaluator flight engineer. “Just one of them costs more than an iPad he said.
Elimination of the paper will allow C-130s and other airframes to consume less fuel or carry slight larger loads.
The Air Force awarded a $9.6 million contract for as many as 18,000 tablets. The change is estimated to save AMC $750,000 annually in fuel costs alone.
The printing, paper and distribution costs are estimated at $5 million annually.
The iPads the Air Force is buying are the WI-FI only (no cellular) 32 GB version. The cost per unit is about $520, which is a discount of about $80.