EFB Forever

Nav Canada has just discontinued the issuance of paper approach plates, the little diagrams telling pilots the safe and legal way to arrive at runways in bad weather. They used to come out every 56 days, but the last ones expired about a month ago. You may recall -- if you have a really good memory -- previous posts I have made comparing the utility and reliability of paper and electronic charts. My opinion on this matters no more. Every operator in Canada must convert to an electronic form. I have been wondering every fifty-six days since I started this process how many operators neglected to read the little yellow insert in the Nav Canada publications box warning us of the end, and who are only this month finding out that they have to convert. And no, Transport Canada doesn't let us just pick up an iPad and go. The company operations manual has to give painful detail on how the hardware and software will be administered. My manuals aren't quite as interesting as my blog posts, although these days they are issued far more frequently.

This sentence from my Company Operations Manual perhaps gives you a tiny taste.

While the EFB cannot mimic the ability of paper charts and books to serve as tinder in a remote survival situation, its battery can instead provide ignition for locally sourced kindling.

The section on RNAV operations also contains the phrase "pilots shall not blindly follow the magic pink line" which I put in as a placeholder while writing the manual, but I got busy flying and someone else finished it up, apparently not being able to tell the difference between me putting down random thoughts while thinking of what to write, and me actually writing. Not that surprising, really.