OFP in real life: printed or electronic?

Discussion Hub Real-life Aviation
1

I know this is a silly question, but was curious: for airline OFPs, do pilots have to print out the entire document, or do they now have the option to just keep it on their EFB/tablet? I am on a long flight in the sim (DHL freight ZSPD-KLAX in the B77F), and was wondering if a pilot would have to print out all 200+ pages of it.

2

My father used to fly for the airlines. Late in his career it was electronic.

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3

Interesting. I wasn’t sure if it was one of those things where they would want redundancy.

”Here’s an EFB with everything on it buuuuut…just in case, here’s 200 pages in case the EFB fails.”

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What do you have on these 200+ pages? I’ve just generated this flight plan on simbrief and OFP is 29 pages long.

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Looks like the bulk of it is all NOTAMS. I tried changing OFP formats and they are similar lengths.

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Electronic, we don’t print out anything anymore. Everything can be filled out on the iPad and then send after flight. Where I fly we don’t have any papers on-board other than the technical log.

NOTAMs and weather are electronic as well and part of the briefing package. There are many online solutions, Jepessen Aviator and Navblue Mission+ are probably the most popular for airlines.

It is not simply an electronic version of the paper OFP, there usually is a tab to record flight and block times, fuel at departure and on arrival, weather and NOTAMs, and a digital navlog for fuel and time checks.

Redundancy is in the form of having 2 iPads onboard and synching those before departure. Further charts are electronic of course, no big trip kits onboard, performance is electronic. Pretty much everything is electronic.

I sometimes miss a paper briefing package, I used to mark what is important, highlight what part of the TAF are relevant for my flight etc. I nowadays make a couple of notes on a piece of paper for myself, especially if there are a lot of NOTAMs.

What I certainly don’t miss is the weekly updates with paper tripkits, especially when carrying multiple regions :smiley:.

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I guess if you print all the en-route NOTAMs of overflown FIRs it is more than 29 pages, not sure about 200 pages, that seems excessive.

But yeah, the NOTAM system is borked. This one is a must see :smiley:.

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