Low-fare airline Norwegian has selected Astronics Corporation’s webFB Wireless Electronic Flight Bag device, offered through its wholly owned subsidiary Astronics Ballard Technology.

Norwegian will install the webFB on all of its Boeing 737NG aircraft to improve and automate aircraft data collection.

Aleksander Geist, senior avionics engineer with Norwegian, says, “For quite some time, we have been searching for a solution to improve and automate the collection of aircraft data, which currently is a manual process using physical media. The webFB, in conjunction with our EFBs, offer a very flexible and cost-effective solution.”

Giest continued: “Astronics Ballard Technology has been very responsive in our aircraft trials and we are pleased with the data acquisition performance and the long-term benefit it will have for our organization. We are already looking ahead to future use cases that will allow us to further leverage our webFB technology investment.”

Astronics participated with the airline in a year-long operational trial of the webFB held to validate the suitability of the device in operation as well as the economic benefits of the solution.

“We are very excited to be working with Norwegian Air Shuttle on this project. Their application is an ideal match for the high-reliability ARINC 717 data capture capabilities of the webFB,” said Jon Neal, president of Astronics Ballard Technology. “They also recognize the tremendous advantage of a simple, easy-to-install solution that minimizes aircraft downtime and allows them to quickly retrofit their fleet and gain immediate benefits.”

The webFB gathers data from the aircraft’s ARINC 717 databus which is wirelessly routed to the electronic flight bags (EFBs) where it is automatically transferred by Norwegian to a data centre and used for post-flight analysis. With the webFB already operating on 10 aircraft, the airline will install the product on all of their additional Boeing 737NG aircraft.