Case Study: Lufthansa achieves a secure, paperless cockpit and faster, fully supported pilot notebooks with Ubuntu

Ubuntu provides a secure and easily accessible system for german pilots

Contact Air GmbH is a regional airline operating 13 turboprop aircraft on behalf of Lufthansa, with 120 pilots relying on notebooks for performance calculations, logging, training, documentation and communication. In 2006 the airline needed to upgrade all laptops to new hardware and find a Linux distribution that could be certified for safety‑critical use and would actually run on the new machines—previous distributions were too large, slow and lacked proper hardware support.

The company deployed Ubuntu on all 120 notebooks, which provided full support for the new Dell Latitude 420 hardware, faster boot times and a more user‑friendly experience that met the airline’s security and certification needs. Since early 2006 pilots have used Ubuntu as a robust, stable and secure platform for a paperless cockpit, connecting via G3/UMTS or WLAN to update thousands of charts and perform pre‑flight calculations from a central server.

Lufthansa

Jens Technau

Software Developer