Keep the paper because the tablet quits in ordinary ways. Dead battery, unplugged cable, a reboot on downwind, a glareshield-mounted iPad that hits its thermal limit on a July afternoon and shuts itself off. None of that is exotic, and it tends to land at the moment you reach for your before-landing checklist. A printed checklist costs a page of paper and has no failure mode worth naming.
This is not an anti-tablet piece. Electronic flight bags are one of the best things to happen to GA, and I don’t miss hauling a bag of paper charts around KOAK. But a device carrying that much load deserves a backup, and paper is the cheapest one you can carry.
EFBs fail in documented, ordinary ways
iPad Pilot News, an EFB-focused outlet, frames the standard mitigation as “two of everything” plus a charged backup power source, precisely because devices die from forgotten charging, failed cables, and in-flight power loss: Does Your EFB Backup Plan Pass the Test?. Nothing dramatic in that list. A flaky cable is a boring failure right up until the screen is dark and you’re turning base.
Heat is the failure mode pilots underestimate
Clamp a tablet to the glareshield in direct sun and it will reach a thermal limit and shut itself off to protect the hardware, sometimes within minutes. That thermal shutdown is designed behavior, and it’s far more common than thermal runaway, the serious cascade where heat spreads between lithium-ion cells. CTS Systems lays out the difference in Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) Thermal Runaway.
Lithium-ion incidents aren’t rare across aviation as a whole. NBAA, referencing compliance data, has noted that smoke, heat, or fire events involving lithium-ion batteries occur more than once a week across U.S. aircraft: Apple Issues New Compliance Data for iPad EFB. Be precise about it: that figure spans all of aviation rather than GA singles, so it’s evidence these batteries deserve respect, not a GA accident rate. The cockpit point holds either way. The thing displaying your checklist can quit when the cabin is baking, which is usually when you have the least attention to spare.
The regulatory baseline: available in the aircraft
Under 14 CFR 91.9, the approved Airplane/Rotorcraft Flight Manual, or the approved manual material, markings, and placards, must be available in the aircraft on each flight. An EFB can carry that role when it meets the applicable guidance. The baseline is availability, and availability is what a single point of failure threatens.
FAA Advisory Circular 91-78 speaks to Part 91 operators moving toward a paperless cockpit, including paper backups during the transition to EFB use. I’m not going to paraphrase its wording secondhand. Pull it from the FAA at AC 91-78, and read the broader EFB guidance in AC 120-76E while you’re in there. The thrust, that a backup stays readily available while you build confidence in an all-electronic setup, matches everything else here.
Redundancy is the point, not nostalgia
Call this part opinion. Paper is the fallback layer in a system built on the assumption that any single point of failure picks the worst possible moment to go: battery, screen, software crash, thermal shutdown. It’s the same habit as running a flow and letting the page catch whatever my hands skipped, which is the whole argument in flows, then checklists. Redundancy is respect for how systems actually fail.
A printed checklist backs up an EFB well because it has nothing to go wrong. No power, no heat limit, no update at 200 feet AGL, and it costs almost nothing to reprint when something changes. Laminate it or slide it into a kneeboard and it will outlast several tablets.
What a good paper backup looks like
If you’re going to carry one, make it worth carrying:
- Print it legible. The whole value is reading it instantly when the tablet is dark. Type you can read at arm’s length in bumps, honest spacing, nothing decorative.
- Match it to your aircraft and your habits. Your tail number, your panel, the flows your instructor taught. A generic sheet you half-recognize will slow you down at exactly the wrong time. If you fly a Skyhawk, the Cessna 172 template is a reasonable place to start editing against your own POH.
- Keep the killer items obvious. Fuel, mixture, flaps, gear, trim: the items you least want to miss should be the easiest to find on the page.
- Keep the approved POH aboard too. The checklist is a memory aid built from the book. The book still has to be in the airplane.
Fly with both, and keep the cheap one current enough that the day the expensive one quits is a non-event. Mine gets reprinted any time a number changes, at a cost of one sheet of paper.
Common questions
Isn't a second tablet a better backup than paper?
A second device adds redundancy, and 'two of everything' is genuinely good advice. But two tablets can share failure modes — the same heat, the same forgotten charge, the same software update. Paper fails in none of those ways, which is exactly why it complements a second device rather than duplicating it.
Does the FAA require a paper backup for Part 91?
The regulatory baseline in 14 CFR 91.9(b) is that the approved flight manual material be available in the aircraft. FAA advisory material addresses paper backups during the transition to EFB use — read AC 91-78 and AC 120-76E directly for the specifics rather than relying on a summary, and treat this as background, not legal advice.