Hand Held Weight and Balance

[Baby Diesel]

Gidday all,

Is there anyone out there using Hand Held PDA's to work weight and balance from the cockpit during turnarounds.

Looking for something which will also printout final to be left with handling agent. Can a PDA be linked in any way to the aircraft ACARS printer or would the printer have to be separate?

About 10 years ago came across a group in Europe who were trying to develop such a weapon which had its own printer attached - can't remember the company name but could have been Scandi origin - mainly aimed at the executive jet market.

All info gratefully received.

Compliments of the season to you all.

Baby Diesel

[BOAC]

Its not too difficult to construct an Excel sheet from the company load and balance data to run the load/balance function, but printing out is a whole new game!

[Tinstaafl]

About 4 years ago Aurigny in the Channel Islands were using Psions or similar to do the W&B for their Trislanders. Can't remember what they did for a printout. Might have copied the figure by hand onto a form or something.

[Paterbrat]

Using the Panasonic Toughbook from Flight Deck Resources with Jeppesen Flightstar/Flightmap 9.0 Corporate version in which we have modeled our aircraft. Also have Flight Deck and JepView installed.

Print out via a USB IR dongle which allows communication/connecting to an IR port in a Cannon BJC 50 portable printer. The program gives weight and balance chart with T/O C/G and landing C/G, Flight Logs, flight plan forms FAA/and ICAO . We can also print out and have hard papercopies of our landing plates selected from JepView, and use Flight Deck on the PED in the cockpit as a back-up and data base. of departure destination and alternate plates for each sector.

The new Centrino chip 900mhz Pentium means the battery lasts about six-seven and a half hours between charges. Full Windows XP operating system 256 expandable to 786 and a 40Gig hard disc , wireless LAN means you can use it down route as a fully functional laptop. It's waterproof shockproof and has colour TFT active matrix touch screen which is smaller than the dimensions of an A4 sheet is less than two inches thick and very light about 4 pounds. Good screen visibility in sunlight or night and very fine resolution.

[m&v]

Skyservice airlines of Toronto used an excellent handheld,with a printing unit for the A320,several years ago.Discontinued due to 'shortage' of units for the whole'new' fleet...:O