Delta Replacing Flight Manuals with Surface Tablets

Frosty Piss writes "Delta Air Lines plans to buy 11,000 Microsoft Surface 2 tablets for its pilots to replace the heavy bundles of books and maps they haul around now. Delta says the Surface tablets will save it $13 million per year in fuel and other costs. Right now, each pilot carries a 38-pound flight bag with manuals and maps. Other airlines, including American and United, have been buying Apple's iPad for that purpose. One reason Delta picked a Microsoft device was that it's easier to give pilots separate sections for company and personal use, said Steve Dickson, Delta's senior vice president for flight operations. Another reason for picking the Surface tablet is that Delta's training software also runs on the same Windows operating system as the tablets, reducing the need to redo that software for another device, Dickson said."

Comments

"personal use" on flight-critical device

[smash]

... what could possibly go wrong?

Re:"personal use" on flight-critical device

[bondsbw]

Separating personal use from professional use is better than mixing them.

Re:"personal use" on flight-critical device

[Old-Claimjumper]

Sorry, Wrong!

The FAA requires up-to-date charts appropriate for the routes being flown. The FAA has approved these as legal substitutes for printed charts as long as they are current (at Least IPads are, I assume Delta will be getting approval for these things).

So unless they are also carrying the "38 pounds" of paper charts, these things ARE flight critical devices by definition.

Re:"personal use" on flight-critical device

[segin]

TFA says they're buying Surface 2 tablets, not Surface Pro 2. Which use ARM processors. Which cannot run malware designed for x86. Which mostly invalidates your argument.

Re:A third reason is they gave it to us free

[phantomfive]

I can tell you, I hate Microsoft for both rational and irrational reasons. But there is one area that Microsoft beats out the competition, and that is backwards compatibility. If you want to write software that will still run in 10 years, then choosing carefully among Microsoft technologies is a decent way to do that. So if I were Delta, and were deciding whether to do this on iPads or Window Tablets, I would also choose the Windows Tablet, because Apple has demonstrated they have no longterm (or medium term) commitment to backwards compatibility. That is especially true since they already have a codebase set up to run on Windows. Remember that the tablets themselves are likely the cheapest part of this whole operation.

The best would be Linux tablets, because then you can own the whole software stack. The only drawback is the UI situation on Linux........

Possible reasons?

[onyxruby]

Microsoft would have offered a very sweetheart deal pricewise for this.

From Delta's standpoint it would also have the advantage in that almost nothing runs on it, meaning that people aren't going to muck with it install crap software and malware on the Surface RT is all but unheard of. They also almost certainly would have offered some type of enterprise management tools for the tablets from MS.

Enterprise support for the Ipad is a royal pain at best and tools are quite limited. The app store is oblivious to the concept that a computer could be owned my a company instead of a person. Support issues go far beyond these and their IT department doubtless didn't want to deal with it.

I'm not endorsing the Surface RT and I've certainly gone on the record here about how it's a terrible tablet. I'm just explaining the logic behind the order. They certainly could have made a much better choice than the Surface RT.

Re:My experience....

[jones_supa]

Yet another example how people think they can get by with a tablet but just end up rebuilding the laptop.