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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.
holding the plane wrong
or at least the Android variant thereof. Fools.
Now there's a technology fail for you.
Reminds me of a US naval ship being towed to shore because Windows NT crashed.
I guess this is a problem when you have consumer technology being used in mission critical environments.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
to create the no IOS zone. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
How much does this little accidental thing cost the airline overall? How often can they afford this before it eclipses the savings? Go on, do tell.
Let's see these AA iPads and the software for what they really are: pieces of business-critical software / hardware. Which means that they have to treat it like any other combination of business critical software and hardware. The entire configuration is frozen, software, OS, patches and all, and any change is thoroughly tested before it is pushed to the production devices.
So what happened? One news item hints at a recent update causing the issue. Where did the update come from? Was iOS updated, or the app? Was this update tested before being rolled out?
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I wonder how long it takes to recoup the cost of this disruption by continuing to carry lighter manuals.
What I'm wondering is what would have happened had this iPad crash occurred during the flight post-takeoff. Why do they not carry the paper manuals as a backup in case this sort of thing happens?
A "no radio" device that has reasonably current copies of everything plus paper (yes, paper) copies of updated pages would weigh less than a pound and would be usage as a backup.
For further redundancy the backup should use a completely different OS.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Here at american, we know you've come to expect the broken traytables, rotted seatback pockets, and permanently reclined seating prominently featured on our aging reagan-era Boeing fleet. We know none of you understand what the hell a gold line american star alliance partner is, but are well aware it means you're about to board a 42 seat brazillian rust-bucket with misaligned landing wheels and a weird styrofoam smell. Each year we add more rare earth metals and precious gems to our flight upgrade programs in an in incorrigible effort to confuse and infuriate weary passengers. What is Americium? Shouldnt platinum be more worthy than sapphire? who knows, who cares. We recognize your supreme discomfort at 4 AM as our cancelled connector to newark hobbles mercifully into the hanger for 20 years of well-earned repair to be condensed into 9 minutes of speed tape and air fresheners. We know you choose American because our 35 year old concourse seating has gone from suede to patent leather from use, and its foam long since evaporated to a fine haze of formaldehyde. And we, American, appreciate your undying commitment to sit in an airplane that smells canned soup and farts while futile attempts to adjust your weight merely prolong your encounter with the threadbare frame of a seat no more comfortable than a bus stop bench. But we cannot sacrifice our commitment to swiping, clicking, and tapping on a device that makes our second hand aeroflot cockpits look like modern museums to supercomputing and hence have cancelled numerous flights.
Good people go to bed earlier.
"Yes, but does it fly Linux?"
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?
In seriousness now, I won't make fun of the part where they went for the vendor with the most posh consumer tablet, instead of having something customized for this job.
But I am wondering, since it was just supposed to replace the paper manuals, why weren't those manuals the backup? Ok, don't carry them around all the time, but shouldn't they still be available as a backup to take them to the pilots if there is trouble with the ipads instead of just canceling the flight?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) software is an essential tools for aviation. One iPad can handle multiple charts, maps, and devices which would can weight of more than 20 lbs. Jeppesen software is the American Airlines is the corporate EFB software. A recent update crashed. The Jeppesen tool is a well known company and has Aerospace level of testing. It still failed. There are other EFB tools out there. This has nothing to do with WiFi and everything to do with software development.
What happens if the iPrecious crashes mid flight? And if they do still have the old maps, why the delay? Who thought it was a bright idea to create cascading chaos in daily airtraffic just for pilot convenience?
Well, just about...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I read the headline and envisioned several AA planes being slowly fed into a meat grinder.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Just read and memorize the manuals so that it's not an issue.
But unfortunately, haters gonna hate, so many here are already spinning this as "POS Apple iPad crashed cause it suxors!" instead of the much more accurate "POS software update went bad and crashed the hardware".
"frequent injuries incurred by pilots from carrying heavy flight bags, and would also save time by making revisions electronically." Who makes this stuff up? I went hiking with a forty pound backpack. I forded streams and climbed over boulders as big as a car at elevations from six to nine thousand feet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The captain could have asked someone to turn on their phones wifi hotspot for a minute, or done i himself if he knew how. Would have saved a trip back to the gate.
Software glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the water
a database overfow error (resulting from a divide by zero operation) caused the ship's propulsion system to fail.
The Yorktown Affair
And six engines, 4 wings and a half dozen pilots.
Belt AND suspenders!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Reminds me of a US naval ship being towed to shore because Windows NT crashed.
In 1997, the ship in question was a test bed for the introduction of COTS technologies at sea. The Wikipedia essay on the Aegis Cruiser "Yorktown" kind of slides over the fact that the ship remained in active service until 2004 with no other significant Windows-related incidents. USS Yorktown (CG-48)
It seems reasonable to have three tablets on the flight deck, running iOS, Android, and Windows 8 for Atom.
The app crashed, not the OS. So having multiple OSes may help in some situations, but not in this one. Some mission critical applications are implemented by two teams working independently. Since this app is basically just a PDF reader with a customized menu, that should not be difficult.
So they basically need to open a PDF file and the ipad crashed while doing it. That sounds about right. They should have gone with a cheaper and more stable Android tablet.
Have gnu, will travel.
It's not that far fetched. I mean, all the electronic systems have physical backups.
So they did not listen to the stewardess and see what happened! :-)
4wdloop
Actually, a linux based "documentation reader" could have been more stable if designed with this single purpose in mind. At the least it could have been a closely controlled software environment (known, tested and not auto upgrading).
But not just because it's LINUX.
4wdloop
Imagine what would happen if the most recent, well-tested update had a bug such that it would crash at a specific time.
By having different OSes and different applications serving up the same data, the odds of such a bug on both the main and backup devices happening simultaneously are greatly reduced.
I say "greatly reduced" instead of "eliminated" because different OSes may still use the same buggy source code (there's BSD- or similar-licensed code in many OSes and applications).
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The iPads aren't directly controlling any of the flight or navigation systems. If an ipad "crashed" in flight, it would be an inconvenience but not a major flight safety issue. The plane would continue to fly, and the pilots could navigate safely to an airport via ground control. All of the ipads crashing at one time might overload ground control, but not likely. Also, the flight waypoints are preloaded into the navigation computers prior to takeoff, so plane will continue on its flightpath with or without the ipad.
I guess I'd be really scared when they start using the ipad for navigation, engine control or auto pilot. (Or perhaps, just for the inflight entertainment).
You should not use cheap commodity hardware/software in critical applications, ever. Pray to your favorite deity that you never find this junk down in the avionics bay.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
That's not agile.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Guys, EFBs work pretty well in the cockpit. I've worked at two companies that use iPads with Jeppesen EFB software. Version control is critical for the OS and the Apps. It sounds like American didn't do proper acceptance testing of updates before telling their pilots to go ahead and update their apps or OS. Their OS/app configuration is not fundamentally different than hundreds of other airlines (yes, including "private" charter airlines that you never hear about). Some companies have better testing and configuration control than other companies.
EFBs are not just used to replace an encyclopedia set of aircraft manuals, they also are used for calculations and immeasurable amounts of data logging. On these merits alone, iPads and other tablets have been quite a revolution in knowledge management.
If I were to assign blame, here's the order of precedence:
- App vendors for lousy software engineering practices resulting in slow performance, frequent crashes, and flawed updates to databases (Jeppesen, hear me???)
- Apple. Yeah, iOS 7 and 8 have had nothing but problems. On my iPad 2 iOS 8 is slooooowwwww, crashes sometimes, and is ugly.
- FAA. The FAA has a really messed up system where a specific region of the FAA has authority of their "district". (terminology not correct) These guys are called POIs or Principle Operations Inspectors (i think). Anyways, whatever they say, goes. One POI in CA may disallow something while a POI in NY may allow it. They each interpret rules differently. This is a MAJOR flaw that has led to asymmetric levels of safety across the FAA (e.g. 14 CFR Part 135 rest rules vs. 14 CFR Part 121 rest rules). Needless to say, the FAA is another big government monstrosity that is glacially slow to inform themselves of the world they live in and even slower to react with safety in mind. It's no surprise that American *probably* doesn't have an iPad quality control mechanism in place to mitigate App update problems.
- Airlines. Airlines do the cheapest thing possible. Nevertheless, their IT folks (like most) "test" software by starting it. If it starts, it's good to go. As pathetic as this sounds, this is the level of "testing" done at most places. Forget about whitebox/blackbox testing! This has frustrated me to no end with airline IT and any company's IT. No operational testing is done except at initial rollout.
Yes, because articles on the internet and in newspapers always only contain exactly correct details, no information ever gets lost, misunderstood, or altered in transmission. So if they say the screen was black, it couldn't possibly have been any other shade, and certainly could not have had any text on it, like an error message or something like that. Because journalists never get this kind of thing wrong.
OK, back to reality. Since both the captain's and first officer's iPad "went black" (?) at the same time, and this in multiple airplanes, even after many months without this problem ever occuring in a rather large fleet of airplanes, I imagine this is probably some configuration error related to some sort of DRM, licence expiration or other kind of protection. I doubt multiple iPads would all "crash" at the same time. Maybe the database had an incorrect expiration date, for example. Must not let pilots fly with out of date charts, better give them no charts at all. That sort of thing. Wouldn't be the first time, I've had a few experiences like that in different airline companies.
We've had an airbus grounded because a student pilot had messed with the on board clock, for example. The computers decided that the deadline for flap inspection had passed (based on the incorrect date set by the student) and refused to extend the flaps for take-off. Maintenance action was required before the plane could take off again.
On iOS, it's likely using Apple's DisplayPDF engine to render the PDFs; likely Adobe's engine to distill them in the first place. But since PDF is a standard, that doesn't really matter; they should just have set up the app such that the PDFs could be exported to a separate reader for display (even Safari would work) as well as pulled up in the app's own interface.
I can empathize with their issues, having digitized a collection of tousands of PDF documents that need to be searchable -- iOS tends to run out of memory while doing this; I can't even load some individual PDFs in standard readers like iBooks without running out of memory. This however isn't due to the display engine or the distilling engine, but is due to memory handling in the UI, and how it decides to cache rendered pages for performance reasons.
They could easily store all the documents in GoodReader and have none of these problems (but also have less functionality surrounding cross-references etc.).
They were issued a Swiss Army Knife when they really needed just a simple knife. A no-frills ereader such as a Nook Simple Touch would have been more appropriate, more reliable, and longer-lasting battery-wise. Need to do something else? Provide another device. You didn't replace all the cockpit instruments with one menu-based screen, because it would be stupid to do so. Likewise with the handheld device.
Your being a complete moron..
These iPads are managed completely by AA. They do NOT connect to the app store. The OS, the apps, and the data come from AA servers. Any forced updates or DRM are managed by AA.
All these problems could've been avoided if ios and android had simple file manager apps where you could store PDF files and use a regular PDF viewer to view docs. Instead, documents are embedded within apps or downloaded from the cloud creating easy points of failures in the custom viewer apps.
The problem isn't that they are relying on a single vendor, nor that they chose iOS over Android, or anything else silly like that.
The problem here is that they are using technology that's functionally tested for basic consumer use in a situation that suggests (and may soon require) a mission-critical level of software and hardware certification.
A lot of people (business people / decision-makers, mostly) don't seem to understand the difference between consumer-oriented hardware/software and safety-critical hardware/software.
Safety-critical hardware/software is designed, developed and tested with security, safety, and stability principles that are not only there "in theory", but are also tested for in practice, with a rigorous validation program that ensures the correct operation of the system. On the hardware front, the device is built to higher standards, such that the core chassis of, say, an iPad-like device would be able to withstand more shock than a consumer-oriented iPad with an Otterbox on.
If an airplane goes into a sudden roll or dive, causes the iPad to go flying across the cockpit and shatters the screen, what then? The pilots need the information in that device to be able to know how to follow the proper procedures to continue flying the aircraft safely. Without it, they can take their best guess and rely on instincts on how to operate the systems, but you cannot expect every pilot to memorize every contingency procedure. That's why the EFBs exist in the first place.
If you can't ensure that your tablet electronic device is at least as rugged as a hardback book, you shouldn't be using them on an airplane.
The problem is that there are few or no vendors of extremely rugged hardware/software solutions that are available in a thin and light form factor akin to an iPad. The safety-critical rugged device sector is 5 to 10 years behind the state-of-the-art consumer device space. That's because it takes many more months to design and ship a device with a much higher level of physical and digital assurance of correct operation. The airlines seem willing to take the risk of failure of these consumer devices, because they would rather have the latest features, like capacitive multitouch, ultra-slim design, retina displays, etc. instead of using something whose technology was state-of-the-art in 2008, but is built like a brick, both physically and software-wise.
We've seen MANY first-hand examples of consumer electronics devices from ALL vendors having extremely dangerous stability and security bugs that would render the device inoperable for the use case the airlines are using it for. We can't take the risk that this important tool will be unavailable when they need it. AA and other carriers need to stop using iPads as replacements for the flight bag, and either pay for the R&D for a proper rugged replacement, or go back to paper.
I'll conclude by saying that the EFB/flight bag is, in my opinion, a safety-critical tool aboard all except the most sophisticated airplanes (e.g. the Airbus A380, which has a computer built into the cockpit on an LCD screen that actually tells the pilots what to do to resolve problems). The airlines are taking a big risk by implementing this with consumer technology. If they "do it right" and work with a vendor that produces rugged industrial mobile devices, it will cost more and have a much longer development cycle than shipping iPads. The devices will almost certainly be heavier, have less "whizzy" displays and UI, have a shorter battery life, and be harder to upgrade if additional features are desired later. But they will have a MUCH higher level of assurance that their correct operation, both hardware and software-wise, will continue to be available in the case of an emergency when they are needed most. It still won't be impossible that they'll break, but it'll be much less likely.
If you're going to reference a pop song ("haters gonna hate"), you chose the wrong pop diva. Rather, you should have used the more apt "Call Me Maybe" by Carly-rae Jeppsen (which is one letter off of "Jeppesen"):
Hey, I just bought you
And this is crazy
But here's my WiFi
So update me maybe?