The U.S. Air Force is expecting to save a serious amount of cash as a result of deploying 18,000 iPads.

With the iPads brought in to replace heavy, paper-bound flight manuals, a spokesman for the Air Force's Air Mobility Command has said that the deployment will save $750,000 per year on fuel alone and "well over $50 million" in total costs over the next 10 years.

"We're saving about 90 pounds of paper per aircraft and limiting the need for each crew member to carry a 30 to 40 pound paper file," Major Brian Moritz, manager of AMC's electronic flight bag program, when speaking to The Street.

"It adds up to quite a lot of weight in paper." The AMC exec revealed that this weight saving did vary significantly by plane — from a saving of 250 pounds on a four-person C-17 to 490 pounds on a C-5 with ten crewmembers.

The AMC won a $9.36 million contract to deploy up to 18,000 third-generation, WiFi-only, 32GB iPads last year. Some 16,000 of these are now in use by AMC aircrew, with the remaining 2,000 units spread out across other Air Force divisions.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Air Combat Command

This article originally published at TabTimes here