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Crashing iPad App Grounds Dozens of American Airline Flights
infolation writes: American Airlines was forced to delay multiple flights on Tuesday night after the iPad app used by pilots crashed. Introduced in 2013, the cockpit iPads are used as an "electronic flight bag," replacing 16kg (35lb) of paper manuals which pilots are typically required to carry on flights. In some cases, the flights had to return to the gate to access Wi-Fi to fix the issue.
I wonder how long it takes to recoup the cost of this disruption by continuing to carry lighter manuals.
Weight.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
What do they put on it? Checklists? Airport charts? Or even approach/departure charts? What if it crashes during taxiing on a busy airport? What if it crashes in the middle of a complicated approach procedure? What if it crashes during checklist and the pilots forget to check a point?
In other words: Why would anyone use cheap crap such as an iPad in a professional passenger airplane? How stupid is that?
What part of gstoddart's post didn't you understand? I don't see any mention of iOS or the app store in that post.
A bit overly defensive, eh?
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
What part of "no fucking kidding" don't you understand?
I didn't say it was the exact same thing, I said it reminded me of a time when another epic technology fail caused a similarly huge cluster fuck.
I don't give a crap what the crash was ... I care that a piece of technology barfed all over the place and left people sitting around going "what the hell do we do now?"
When an airline has to halt operations because of something like their iPad crashing, that's a sure sign that someone hasn't really been doing a sufficient job of testing.
I used to work on a project which dealt with people who do aircraft maintenance .. this is not an industry who collectively takes risks. But apparently their software vendor doesn't see it that way.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
What do you think is "weak" about an iPad for the airline's needs?
Their needs were something stable, light, and easily read. The iPad meets all of those goals (yes, including stability, it was AA's own app that crashed).
Redundancy doesn't need to be hardcopies. Either bring backup I-pads, or better maybe a backup windows tab so you have both diversity and redundancy.
Also, since this happened to many at about the same time, I assume an update or change was to blame. Don't update these unless there is a reason. And test if you do update, or keep a non-updated backup on hand until the update is proven reliable.
single vendor solution, huh? really? REALLY?
I still can't believe so many schools districts make the same mistake. It's like bending over asking to be vendor locked-in.
They DO have a backup...
Both pilots carry IDENTICAL I-Pads.... What amazes me is that nobody thought of the single point of failure, the application the I-Pads run.. OOPS..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
At the time Windows NT wasn't a consumer technology, Windows NT was a serious contender in the server space, for mission critical systems. At that time Linux was still considered a Hobby OS. Other alternatives were Unix variant, but during those stages they weren't really that much better. It was just when we heard that Windows NT crashed, we all laughed at it, because of allegiance towards Linux.
However today... Consumer technology today Windows, Android, iOS. Are really based on Professional Server Grade OS Kernels. They are just running on cheaper hardware.
The issue for this isn't blaming the iPad or iOS but the maker of that App for those documents. They screwed up, This would have happened if they had a Million Dollar professional system in their hands too.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Those flight bags, at 35 lbs, were also very uncomfortable for the pilots to lug around. I remember how heavy a backpack full of textbooks was as a student, and wouldn't wish to repeat that experience at my age, which is still younger than many pilots. I wouldn't be surprised if the pilots were pushing for this as well.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
And then someone has to print some of those books on a regular basis. And then someone has to dispose of them when they expire. And the pilots probably carry regularly updated information for every airport in the countries they might fly in, whether they go to that airport or not.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Windows NT is software. An ipad app is software.
You'd have to pretty damn retarded to not see how the two cases are similar. Not exactly the same of course, which no one claimed anyway.
The update was likely to some item of data the application uses, not the application itself.
I don't see how you have any information to support this assumption. I'd guess its more likely an IOS update and some resulting incompatibility. Updating the data itself is probably the least likely change to cause error. Also, that data probably doesn't change very often, so it would have been pretty obvious if that were a root cause.
The evidence to suggest that it was a data change and not an application update was that their entire fleet of 737's was down. There was no report of another airframe being affected. Also, the data does change on a regular basis. From the FAA:
I'm boggled by the fact that you flyboys brought only ONE type of tech onboard for this map stuff.
Maybe your argument is with Jeppsen. They've had a pretty big monopoly for a very long time now.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”