Electronic flight bag from Thales to be used by Brussels Airlines

Posted by John McHale
NEUILLY-SUR-SEINE, France, 18 March 2011. Thales and Brussels Airlines will use the TopWings electronic flight bag (EFB) for Brussels Airlines' fleet, beginning with the Airbus 319 single aisle aircraft. The EFB integrates hardware and software, and enables the exchange of information in real time between the aircraft and an airline's ground operations.
The Thales TopWings solution reduces operational costs by reducing the amount of paper printed every day eventually moving towards fully paperless operations.
"At Brussels Airlines, we have been studying the implementation of a global and integrated electronic flight bag solution for a while now and Thales has provided the reliable solution that we were looking for," says Thibault Demoulin, Brussels Airlines’ director of flight operations. "Within Brussels Airlines, the electronic flight bag project with Thales is also one of the key elements of our b.green program, a company-wide initiative to reduce our ecological footprint."
The integrated solution designed by Thales specifically for Brussels Airlines is based on NavAero hardware, AMT and Jeppesen software applications across the fleet of 46 aircraft.
TopWings makes the aircraft into a communication node of the airline's information system to provide the right information to the right person at the right time in order to optimize operating costs. It includes various applications designed to increase airlines' operational efficiency, while reducing pilots workload as well as optimizing costs. It is also a greener solution, economizing up to the equivalent of one tree's worth of paper every flight.