Is airline document distribution harder than it should be?

It’s no secret that pilots and flight attendants are respected and celebrated for their work, especially when they successfully handle a critical situation. But what isn’t obvious to the everyday passenger are the manuals and documents that explain how to handle those situations and the work that technical publications authors put into creating them.

When the frontline quickly and easily finds data, they can use it that much faster – enabling them to manage the situation and not the manual. But a few issues with airline document distribution make content harder to find and use than it should be. See how personalized and targeted distribution solves these issues by reading through the points below.

The frontline must leverage ever-increasing data.

All data is necessary, but the amount of available data is so vast that it’s overwhelming. In other words, it’s too much of a good thing. So much so that even when the frontline is trained on where different information is located across manuals, they still have to scroll and squint through PDF pages to find critical data when moments count. As the trend for making flight safety decisions in real time grows, operating this way contributes to pilot cognitive load at a time when they need to think clearly. Click here to see the difference with an EFB folder structure.

Consumer technology is becoming increasingly more personalized; smartphone apps for tracking health habits, playing music based on activity or mood, and turn-by-turn navigation are just a few examples. This expectation has crossed into how we view business technology, especially with a labor force increasingly made up of younger generations. And it makes sense: according to Forrester, 82 percent of workers said a tailored device and ecosystem will increase efficiency and productivity. And 75 percent said a tailored device and ecosystem would lead to faster decision-making when faced with a problem. See an example of personalized and targeted content here.

The number of updates is only increasing

For years, the number of updates to the frontline has always been on an increasing trend. As safety programs improve and safety mandates increase, more and more updates are increasingly part of airline document distribution. The COVID-19 crisis is an example of a factor causing information to change daily (if not more), causing frequent updates of policies and procedures to the frontline. Every time a PDF is updated, the frontline has to download the entire document, which can be thousands of pages and take hours to finish. Being able to send only the updated portions of documents ensures the frontline gets the critical data they need without the wait, increasing their efficiency and effectiveness on the job.