Required Documentation Format

[Jerry 5TJ]

In my vintage Mooney birds other than the registration and airworthiness cards the required documents— POH, W&B, POH supplements — fit snugly into a slim envelope.  

The Ovation with its glass panel and more complex systems had a box of documents in several binders and spiral-bound books.  Probably 10 pounds of paper.

The P46T has at least 20 pounds of required documents to lug around.

Is it legal and acceptable to scan all the documents and carry them in electronic form?  I’m thinking of using a retired iPad for that purpose.  

For that matter, why not just carry the scanned originals in my iPad mini or iPhone?  

Do I have to have paper copies of anything?  Or just the A and R?  

 

 

[paulsalem]

In the professional aviation (121/125/135/91K/91F) world we have mostly gone entirely paperless including aircraft manuals, w&b, mx logs, LOAs, navigation charts. 

ICAO and the FAA don't really say what format documents need to be in: Paper, PDF or stone tablets they only say what documents need to be onboard. 

AC120-76D discusses EFB requirements for commercial carriers. 

So iPhone or iPad PDF or jpeg is fine. 

Edited July 27, 2020 by paulsalem

[midlifeflyer]

This is the AC which applies to the plain vanilla Part 91 GA cockpit. If you read it through, you will see that, just like charts and maps, most of the documents you are talking about may be carried electronically. The AC discusses the usual cautions about adequate backups. 

Format? Pretty much anything which can be viewed by the system you are using. But, for example, I wouldn't have a AFM and it's many supplements in a non searchable (and non bookmarked) series of jpegs or even tifs. PDF has pretty much become the international standard for that. 

[paulsalem]

Also here is NBAA's summary.

[gsxrpilot]

As I understand it, Airworthiness and Registration must be "displayed" all others can be in electronic format.

[EricJ]

2 hours ago, gsxrpilot said:

As I understand it, Airworthiness and Registration must be "displayed" all others can be in electronic format.

That's my understanding as well.   Even when boarding an airliner, if you look around a displayed doc should be in view.

AC120-78A covers pretty much all the various part operations, including 91, and specifically includes discussion of manuals, etc.   As mentioned, the airlines use almost no paper any more.    https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/AC_120-78A.pdf

 

[RLCarter]

My Airworthy Certificate & Registration are original from the FAA, the Owners Manual, Weight & Balance, and a few more things have been converted to 1/2 sheet PDF’s and placed in small 5 ring binder and on my iPad  

[Jim Peace]

There are some avionics manuals that need to be present...I have a few people that fly my plane and not sure if they bring iPads all the time or not so I keep the paper books onboard