flying in chicago

Personally I’ve been thinking about E-ink quite a bit as I’m preparing to start training regularly. With the amount of charts and plates you could need on hand when flying, a small cockpit is not the place you want to unfold giant maps or sift through stacks of paper. E-ink readers, while still fairly young in tech, are at what I consider to be THE future of printed media. I don’t own one myself, but more and more I’m seeing trends that I like.

Looks like someone else likes the trend too.

If the Sony Readers and Amazon Kindles of the world start doing their thing in color (they are all still B&W), I envision a whole generation of pilots whipping out a book shaped gizmo, flicking it on, and having access to thousands of maps, airport diagrams, approach plates, checklists, and more. But wait, Fujitsu is saying they’ll release a color E-ink reader in the fall…

There would be no need to unfold anything, and with the multi-touch gesture technology found on devices like the iPhone, you could have a dizzying array of scalable mapping, plotting, highlighting, and tracking systems at your fingertips.

I wonder if Garmin will get on the E-ink bandwagon with some sort of GPS enabled ebook…