For all the decades since the creation of our air-navigation system pilots stood out for their huge leather cases—cases needed to carry the dozens of en route navigation charts, hundreds of terminal procedures and thousands of approach-plate pages—as well as the many binders needed to organize those plates, SIDS and STARS. All those pieces of paper weigh down a pilot, detract from available payload and constitute a major time-sink when keeping track of and filing updates and changes every 28 days. Distill all those graphics and texts down to ones and zeros of the digital world, however, load them into memory, show them on a small computer's display and you immediately drop all those pounds of paper and move the update process into what for many is more-familiar territory.
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