Thomas Cook Aims High With Vistair

January 10

Thomas Cook will be one of the UK’S first charter airlines to have a complete EFB (electronic flight bag) system in place across its entire fleet as a result of its partnership with Vistair.

The airline, which operates 41 short and mid-haul aircraft from UK airports, has been using Vistair’s Touch flight operations portal for more than six months. Thomas Cook chose Touch to manage its electronic documentation partly as it uses HTML providing very fast word-search functionality, necessary for the flight deck environment.

All the airline’s manuals are now fully-searchable through Touch, giving pilots, crew and maintenance staff full operational access to the relevant information.

Now the system is being upgraded and extended by Vistair for use with EFBs. Vistair and Thomas Cook expect to have the EFB version, which uses Vistair’s Skylight EFB manuals viewer, across its entire fleet by April.

Skylight is a stand-alone EFB application designed to deliver the benefits of Touch offline while in flight.

Patrick Cain, General Manager Flight Support at Thomas Cook Airlines, said: “We set Vistair an ambitious target to extend our Touch system to use with EFBs. 

“We’ve been very pleased with Touch, which our crews find very easy to use. Taking it to the next level will give us a significant competitive edge over our rivals. We will be one of the first UK charter airlines to have integrated our manuals and documentation system with our EFB in this way.

“This has been a really good project to work with Vistair. We’ve found their people very professional.”

Thomas Cook’s fleet is made up of Airbus A330s, A321s and A320s and Boeing 757s and 767s.

Skylight is a purpose-built application providing rapid and simple access to documents and search activities without the need to launch any additional software or an internet connection. It has been designed to work on any target hardware that supports Java. 

Skylight’s key features and benefits include:

• Making electronic manuals as readable and useable as paper
• Providing rapid access to the client’s whole library of manuals through one simple interface
• Offering extremely fast and flexible search capability
• Providing a simple low-bandwidth method of update
• Integration with EFB content management systems for manual promulgation
• Easy and intuitive to use and designed for usability
• Compatibility with Windows, Mac and Linux platforms
• Designed for network or stand-alone use
• Its internal and cross document links work in exactly the same way as those in the PDF library
• Full e-documents functionality 

Documents

• Thomas Cook EFB Release January 2010 Download / 120.3 KB