The EASA EFB regulation exists because a screen in the flight deck can change how an aircraft is flown. For decades the flight bag was a heavy case of paper — charts, the operations manual, performance tables, the minimum equipment list. The electronic flight bag replaced it with a tablet, and because that tablet can influence how you fly, EASA wrote a specific rule for it. For commercial air transport, that rule is CAT.GEN.MPA.141, “Use of electronic flight bags”, in Annex IV (Part-CAT) to Regulation (EU) 965/2012.

What follows is what the rule actually says, where it came from, and why one short obligation ends up shaping everything from the mount on your yoke to the way you cross-check a take-off speed.

Where the EASA EFB regulation came from

The rule did not appear from nowhere. ICAO set the international standard in Annex 6 and expanded on it in Document 10020, the Manual of Electronic Flight Bags. EASA transposed that through Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2018/1975, which inserted the EFB rule into the Air Operations regulation with an applicability date of 9 July 2019. Alongside the hard rule sit the Acceptable Means of Compliance and Guidance Material issued in ED Decision 2019/008/R.

Hard rule, AMC and GM — three different things

Operators routinely conflate the three, and it costs them time in audits. The Implementing Rule — CAT.GEN.MPA.141 — is the binding text. The Acceptable Means of Compliance describe a way of meeting it that the Agency has already accepted. The Guidance Material explains and illustrates. In practice this distinction matters most when you want to do something differently: an AMC is not the only lawful route, but if you depart from it you are the one who has to demonstrate that the rule is still met.

You can read the parent regulation in full on EUR-Lex, Regulation (EU) 965/2012, and the consolidated rule-and-AMC presentation in the EASA Easy Access Rules library. Reading them side by side is the fastest way to see how thin the hard rule is compared with the material built on top of it.

The core obligation, stripped back

Strip the rule back and its core is simple: when an EFB is used on board, the operator must ensure it does not adversely affect the performance of the aircraft’s systems or equipment, and does not degrade the flight crew’s ability to operate the aircraft. Every detailed requirement — securing the device, limiting what it can connect to, cross-checking its output — is a consequence of that one sentence.

That is worth pausing on, because it is the single most useful thing a postholder can carry into an EFB project. The obligation is stated in terms of effect, not equipment. It does not care what brand of tablet you buy. It cares whether the tablet, in the hands of a tired crew on the fourth sector of the day, makes the aeroplane harder to fly.

Why the rest of the rulebook follows from it

Read the rest of the EFB material as answers to that one question and it stops being a list:

• Securing and stowage. A loose tablet can become a projectile, jam a control run, or steal attention — three ways of degrading the crew’s ability to operate the aircraft.
• Classification of applications. Sorting software by the effect of its failure is how you decide how much control a given function needs.
• Cross-checking output. A performance figure the crew never questions is a single point of failure inside the crew’s own decision-making.
• Redundancy and security. Information the crew needs must survive a dead battery or a corrupted data package.

What an inspector is actually looking for

In our experience the questions that land hardest in an EFB audit are not about the regulation text at all. They are about whether the operator can show that it thought about the effect. We would expect an inspector to work outward from the obligation itself: show me the device, show me where it lives in the flight deck, show me what your crews do when it is wrong, and show me who owns the configuration. An operator who answers those four questions fluently rarely has a difficult day. An operator who answers by reciting clause numbers usually does.

The myth: “the EFB rule is an IT project”

The most persistent misconception we meet is that EFB compliance belongs to the IT department, because the subject matter is devices and software. It does not. The obligation in the EASA EFB regulation is written about the aircraft and the crew, which makes it a flight operations obligation that happens to involve technology. Device management is a means; the flight deck is the end.

The practical consequence is organisational. Where EFB ownership sits with IT alone, we consistently see the same gaps: no considered position on what crews do when the device is unavailable, mounts chosen for convenience rather than for the flight deck, and change control that treats an application update as a routine software push rather than a change to operational equipment. None of those are technology failures. They are ownership failures.

Applying the EASA EFB regulation on the line

For flight crew, the practical takeaway is that the EFB is a welcomed tool on one condition: it must never become a hazard to the aircraft or a distraction from flying it. Understand the core obligation and the rest of the EFB rulebook stops being a list and becomes a single, coherent idea you can apply on any day, in any flight deck.

That idea is also a useful test for the awkward cases the manual has not anticipated. A crew asked to do something novel with an EFB — a new application, an unfamiliar mount, a workaround during a technical problem — can ask the rule’s own question. Does this affect the aircraft’s systems or equipment? Does this degrade our ability to operate the aircraft? If the honest answer to either is yes, the answer to the request is no, whatever the manual is silent about.

Where to go next

The four companion articles in this set take the core obligation apart in operational terms: how EASA sorts software in Type A vs Type B EFB applications; the physical discipline of mounting, stowage and critical phases; the gross-error check on performance figures; and what happens when the EFB fails. For the approval and administration side, see our guide to EFB operational approval.

If you hold the EFB portfolio, the structured route through all of it is the Raven EFB Administrator course, which is built for the postholder who has to defend the system rather than simply use it.

Frequently asked questions