Apple Maps Flaw Sends Drivers Across Airport Runway

solareagle writes "The BBC reports that an Alaskan airport says it has had to place barricades across one of its taxiways after an Apple Maps flaw resulted in iPhone users driving across a runway. The airport said it had complained to the phone-maker through the local attorney general's office. 'We asked them to disable the map for Fairbanks until they could correct it, thinking it would be better to have nothing show up than to take the chance that one more person would do this,' Melissa Osborn, chief of operations at the airport, told the Alaska Dispatch newspaper. The airport said it had been told the problem would be fixed by Wednesday. However the BBC still experienced the issue when it tested the app, asking for directions to the site from a property to the east of the airport. By contrast the Google Maps app provided a different, longer route which takes drivers to the property's car park."

Comments

The real question is

[guruevi]

How did the driver get it onto the airport taxiways? I live pretty close to an airport and the taxiways are all very barricaded, you can't just drive onto an airport without someone noticing.

Re:The real question is

[Xolotl]

I agree with GP .. this is an international airport with 737 jet airliners. Yet the only thing stopping them was a "motion-activated gate". This is 2013 ... if nothing else, where was the TSA?

Re:Credulousness

[jythie]

People go to new places fairly regularly. Not everyone has every road and destination for a hundred miles around memorized. In this case it is an Airport, and quite a few people who are going to fly (or pick someone up, or just arrived) are not going to go to the place frequently enough to memorize the roads around it. I think I go to my local one maybe once every 5 years or so, plenty of time to not remember the roads around it.

Re: calendar check.

[iamhassi]

Airport's fault. No one should be able to drive their car right onto the runway, no matter what GPS or voice in their heads is telling them. Fire whoever runs this airport because they're a moron for not putting a fence up

Re: calendar check.

[neonKow]

Airport's fault. No one should be able to drive their car right onto the runway, no matter what GPS or voice in their heads is telling them. Fire whoever runs this airport because they're a moron for not putting a fence up

I think it's pretty reasonable to think that a MILE of warning signs that you might get hit by a freaking plane is enough deterant.

And before you keep going on about physical security, remember that stupid is always going to find a way.

From TFA:

"They had to enter the airport property via a motion-activated gate, and afterwards there are many signs, lights and painted markings, first warning that aircraft may share the road and then that drivers should not be there at all.

"They needed to drive over a mile with all this before reaching the runway. But the drivers disregarded all that because they were following the directions given on their iPhones."

These aren't drunk frat boys pulling some shenaigans in the middle of the night. These are fully competent, licensed drivers who turned off their own brains and replaced them with iPhones. This is NOT the airport's fault. It's called personal responsibility.

Re: calendar check.

[BasilBrush]

Right. So the TSA are x-raying and groping passengers, meanwhile the gates are open for anyone who wants to go joy-riding on the runway. Seems inconsistent.

Re: calendar check.

[hairyfeet]

This is part of a MUCH larger problem I call "the machine never lies" which i have run into MANY times and it goes like this...if common sense tells you one thing and a machine another? The machine never lies so you are incorrect. I have had to call a manager when a cash register said change for a hundred with a 9 dollar purchase was 11 dollars, common sense would tell you that its wrong but the girl simply refused to believe the machine COULD be wrong so hence the manager. I had to go through that again recently when a relative passed on, the moron at the desk refused to believe she didn't owe property taxes for this year...on a piece of property she had sold over a decade ago. Again the machine doesn't lie so no matter what it says they believe it.

As more and more crap like built in mapping end up on every phone I have a feeling we'll see a lot of morons driving off of bridges, driving out in front of trains, as long as the machine tells them to? The little lemmings will march on...God who would have thought that Idiocracy would end up being a documentary?