CASE STUDY: PEGASUS AIRLINES
critical to navigational safety were stored in aircraft cockpits and, with a weight of up to 50 kilograms, they added to fuel burn plus every update had to be made manually at the cost of increased workload and higher expenditure — paper, printing and copying costs. EFB improved in-flight efficiency for Pegasus, coupling the EFB software with the Panasonic Toughpad FZ-G1 10” tablet which has EFB certification and has been proven to withstand impact, water, dust, vibration and extreme temperatures, with a screen that can be read in direct sunlight.
PEGASUS INTERNATIONAL ROUTE NETWORK
As well as the named brand itself, Pegasus also has two subsidiary airlines: iZair, based in Izmir, Turkey and AirManas, based in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Pegasus flies 43 Boeing 737-800NG plus 24 Airbus A320, 12 –CEO and 12 –NEO types; Pegasus was launch customer for the A320-NEO. iZair has seven B737-800NG and AirManas has two B737-800 plus one B737-400. In addition to the current 77 strong fleet across the businesses, a further 65 Airbus A320s are on order so that, by 2023 we expect the fleet size to exceed 150. For a number of reasons, we decided to build our own EFB at Pegasus and, at the same time, we built an aircraft tracking system so that the airline can know where all its aircraft are at any time.
EFB AT PEGASUS
PEGASUS DOMESTIC ROUTE NETWORK
In 2015, Pegasus with Panasonic launched the electronic flight bag (EFB) project; a digital system that helps to create, manage and store the documents that pilots need during a flight. Before Pegasus had any sort of EFB, paper documents AIRCRAFT IT Operations • MARCH-APRIL 2018 • 45
FIGURE 1
The journey to today’s EFB
The Pegasus development and implementation team worked for more than a year to create a unique user-friendly system. In fact, the airline had been using EFB applications since 2009 (figure 1) when we started to use a laptop in the cockpit before take-off and after landing but not enroute. Following the arrival of Cloud technology and tablets we started to use tablets in our cockpits with the introduction of the new solution. With Windows OS and Cloud technology we now enjoy a near flawless package that has become indispensable for all flights. We did look at EFB software from different vendors but we feel that EFB needs to be an integrated system, not just software (figure 2). Also, while off-the-shelf