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FAA Permits American Airlines To Use iPads In Cockpit "In All Phases of Flight"
hypnosec writes "American Airlines has announced that it has received permission from FAA to allow its pilots to use iPads in the cockpit during 'all phases of flight.' According to the airlines, the tablet will enable pilots to store documentation in electronic form on the iPad which otherwise weighs 15.876 kg (35 pounds) when in printed form. Use of the digital documentation will enable the airlines to save as much as U.S. $1.2 million of fuel each year." That number sounds both awfully low and awfully specific.
See? I knew it was okay to use electronics during takeoff and landing! The pilots are using them!!! SEE??!?!!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
It's the rolling bags of charts they have to carry with them whenever they fly. There are regulations that specify what charts they have to carry; all in all, a "Jep Bag" is about 35 pounds, and both pilots carry one. If they're using a Electronic Flight Bag app for the iPad, that's a pretty straightforward conversion of mass and very specific savings.
I love vegetarians - some of my favorite foods are vegetarians.
I'd hate to think of a pilot realizing his fuel tank is running low on fuel just when he needs to perform a critical maneuver (like not crash).
I wonder how the heck they solved that problem?!?!?!
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
What I wanna know is: If saving a few pounds adds up to so much fuel then why aren't they weighing passengers and charging them accordingly? How come an extra bag costs me $50 but the 350lb guy pays the same fare as a 120lb guy?
No sig today...
What documents could they even be carrying that are considered critical/vital for a safe landing?
The ipad breaks. ... low and slow and you can use cell phones on a plane just fine... Cell network can't tell difference between my Cessna 172 at 1000 feet and 60 knots from my car on the side of a 1000 foot hill at 60 MPH... Yes, I know, its not gonna work well at 35000 feet and 500 MPH, but then again you don't have much to worry about up there.
The paper printouts of both the pilot and copilot get coffee dumped on them (at least some pilots I know like to plan flights on their desktop PC and then print out neatly annotated paperwork specifically for their flight.... the charts for some airport 100 miles away are for emergency diversion use not daily flying)
Then the pilot's phone breaks (lots of pilots have a charts app on their phone)
Then the copilots phone breaks.
Then both redundant comm radios break so they can't ask ATC for help (This doesn't scale if no one ever carries plates and everyone pesters ATC for every little detail every time, but a 1 in a billion accident in a crazy scenario is perfectly scalable...)
Then they're too low on fuel to fly that triangle pattern (I forget the exact shape but its the pattern that means holy shit I'm lost please send me an escort)
Then the mode C transponder fails so they can't change the code to emergency thus getting themselves an "escort", but the mode C failure isn't noticed by ATC who naturally think the plane just crashed so they scramble everyone over to look at you. So this is a weird situation... maybe if the transponder and its circuit breaker had superglue sprayed all over it?
Then the "sat phone" system fails so they can't call the tower phone or any other person in the entire world who has charts
Then every single cell phone on the plane fails
Then the landing lights have to fail so you can't communicate with a tower via morse light flashing. SOS landing lights will get them all wound up..
Then the built in GPS which also usually has charts and data has to fail (admittedly, usually no NOTAMs...)
Also the pilots hand held GPS has to fail (lots of pilots have a GPS stuffed in their flight bag, right next to the flashlight) and the copilots.
Then bad weather over a large area has to roll in so they can't simply go VFR approach and just eyeball it (gonna be a rough, but probably safe, landing)
There have to be no other planes in the air to follow or get attention of..
The compass and a couple primary flight instruments and the clock all have to fail so they can't dead reckon their position (like over the ocean or something)
Well, lets say both pilots are new to the area so they can't rely on memory.
There's probably a few other things that have to break that I haven't thought of before a ipad failure will take out a plane. Then again if more than a dozen other things listed above all also have to break simultaneously its hard to give JUST the ipad all the credit for crashing the plane.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Hi, I work with the FAA, including on projects involving Electronic Flight Bag research and testing.
Aeronautical charts in the US have a 56-day publication cycle. That means every 56 days, your paper charts are (possibly) out of date and should be replaced. Usually they're not, as most things DON'T change from one cycle to another, but there are always changes. So if you follow the approach procedures for a terminal in your flight bag, you may be following incorrect procedures, which at the very least is going to make ATC grumpy and in a worst case scenario could seriously impact safety. An iPad based solution means up-to-date charts can be loaded in seconds during pre-flight, instead of manually having to replace possibly dozens of individual manuals located in a heavy, bulky bag. Twice, since both pilots are required to have a copy.
So, while as a "professional researcher," you can probably feel secure in the knowledge that the ten-year-old mass spectrometer you're working with can be safely used with the manual that came with it ten years ago, the same thing is not the least bit true in the aviation world.
That being said, I'd much rather an up-to-date electronic manual, even for older hardware. Every manual has errors in it which can be hopefully corrected in future revisions...
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
The checklists shouldn't be going anywhere. Disclaimer: I dont fly for AA, but I did fly for another airline. The pilots carry docs and the plane carries docs. The plane should have at least 2 checklists and a quick reference handbook, in printed form, in the cockpit. The checklists cover all normal procedures for all phases of flight. The QRH has all of the abnormal checklists. The absolutely vital emergency procedures are printed also in the QRH but the primary source is the pilots memory (things that need to be accomplished ASAP before there is time to consult the book).
What the electronic flight bag (EFB) is going to replace is the junk the pilots carry. My flight bag had 2 2" binders full of nothing but approach plates, a 1" binder with our hub airport approach plates in it, a 1" foldout thing with all of the enroute maps, a 1" binder with the company flight ops (essentially 14 CFR 121 plus whatever opspecs the airline has approval for), a 2" binder with procedures and checklists (serves as backup for the checklists and QRH that the airplane carries), a 2" binder with our collective bargaining agreement in it. Not carried was another 2" binder that were all of the details of the aircraft systems, it was not required to be carries and there just wasnt room for it. The EFB replaces all of that into a tablet form factor.
On a typical flight the only things in that bag that get touched are the high enroute chart I need, the airport diagram and company page for the departure airport and the approach plate, airport diagram and company page for the arrival airport. The checklist used is the laminated one that belongs to the airplane. If there is an abnormal, the QRH belonging to the airplane is consulted (in conjunction with other docs on the airplane: the MEL book and the logbook).
Actually, the main reason for the whole "seat backs up, tray tables closed, put away your portable electronics" rule is that the takeoff and landing are the most dangerous parts of a flight, and if something goes wrong, people need to be able to respond, need to not be distracted, and need to not have extra impediments to moving within the cabin.
For in-flight, the ban on cellular phones is actually technical in reason: each cell tower can only handle so many connected devices at once, even if they're not actively communicating with the tower. Cell phones use line-of-sight frequencies, which means that on the ground, any given phone is only going to see (and consume "slots" on) a handful of towers. In the air, every phone that's turned on will blanket a huge number of towers. For one of two phones this doesn't matter at all (so yeah, turning on your phone in an emergency is fine), but if people didn't turn their phone radios off, every passenger in every plane over a given city would be adding to the load of every single tower.
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