Tampa Bay Buccaneers replace playbooks with iPads

If being a professional football player wasn’t already a sweet enough deal, imagine being told by your coach that you’re getting a free iPad. Tampa Bay Buccaneers coach Raheem Morris has issued his entire team iPad 2 tablets to replace printed playbooks and to allow players to re-watch game videos, reports the St. Petersburg Times.

The move to go paperless by replacing printed tomes with tablets is becoming a trend at companies and organizations. Two days ago, United Airlines announced it was purchasing 11,000 iPads to supplant massive flight manuals and give pilots access to digital flight tools.

Tampa Bay has told its 90 players to bring the iPads to practices and games instead of playbooks, which are the size of the “Yellow Pages.” Players can use the devices at home to review important practice, situational and game footage from anywhere they choose, rather than a team room with a projector or their personal TVs.

“It’s crazy how much technology has changed the game,” second-year safety Cody Grimm told the St. Petersburg Times. “Back in the day, I think probably the whole team had to sit down with a projector and a reel, and watch the film together. They’d have the whole offense in the same meeting room. Now we all have our own iPad.”

Using a tablet instead of a paper playbook also gives the team a better sense of security in case it is lost. Players can lock the devices with a passcode, and if an iPad is ever stolen, the device can be remotely wiped using the Find my iPhone application.

Overall, it seems like a pretty smart deal all around, and I expect other NFL teams might follow this inventive play.

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Tags: Buccaneers, iPad, NFL, Tampa Bay

Companies: Apple, National Football League

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United Airlines buys 11K iPads to help pilots go paperless

United Airlines on Tuesday announced it has purchased 11,000 Apple iPads to and will be giving one to all United and Continental pilots.

The airline wants to replace massive paper flight manuals in the cockpit with a more versatile digital solution. The first iPads started being deployed this month, and all pilots will be using iPads by the end of the year.

“The paperless flight deck represents the next generation of flying,” said Captain Fred Abbott, United’s senior vice president of flight operations, in a statement. “The introduction of iPads ensures our pilots have essential and real-time information at their fingertips at all times throughout the flight.”

Not only will the iPad make it easier to reference flight information, but also the company says the new tools will save 16 million sheets of paper and 326,000 gallons of jet fuel per year. The company writes:

Each iPad, which weighs less than 1.5 pounds, will replace approximately 38 pounds of paper operating manuals, navigation charts, reference handbooks, flight checklists, logbooks and weather information in a pilot’s flight bag. A conventional flight bag full of paper materials contains an average of 12,000 sheets of paper per pilot. The green benefits of moving to EFBs are two-fold–it significantly reduces paper use and printing, and, in turn, reduces fuel consumption.

United isn’t the first airline to bring tablets onto its airplanes. In June, American Airlines bought 6,000 Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 devices to offer as amenities in premium-level cabins of some transcontinental and international flights.

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Tags: airlines, iPad, pilots, tablets

Companies: Apple, United Airlines

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