B737-800
Flight Crew Air Transport Pilot (ATP); Flight Crew Instrument; Flight Crew Multiengine
Flight Crew Last 90 Days 228
No Specific Anomaly Occurred All Types
General None Reported / Taken
Equipment / Tooling; Company Policy
Printed copies of the weight and balance information and preflight performance data made Captain's review of data more clear and precise; enhancing safety. Captain had been off for six weeks; moving slowly through checklists and flows. The improvement in my situational awareness between this particular flight (having the printout) and the others during the same trip was significant; highlighting items on the report and completing an overall review (with all data presented on a single page) allowed me to create a better shared mental model with First Officer. On subsequent flights; returning to paging through FMC screens to review data and conduct checklist; it felt as if crew had returned to a program of haphazard; degraded; antiquated and less precise operations.Recommend installing flight deck printers on all Company aircraft.
B737-800 Captain reported that the addition of a cockpit printer resulted in greatly improved situational awareness.