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Some American Airlines planes are grounded because the pilots’ iPads crashed

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Re: Some American Airlines planes are grounded because the pilots’ iPads crashed

#11
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[deleted]

Actually this seems extraordinarily unlikely. Your proposition is that a no-iOS zone was maliciously created in multiple highly secure and surveilled areas across the country (ie airports) but despite the fact that the hack should affect all iOS devices in range, there were no reports whatsoever of any passenger devices (nor the pilots iPhones for that matter) being disabled.

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Re: Some American Airlines planes are grounded because the pilots’ iPads crashed

#12
Thanks for the better title on HN. If you look at most reports on the issue, the title mentions "An iPad glitch" making it sound the iPads are at fault rather than a software issue.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/29/apple-ipad... http://qz.com/393909/american-airlines-planes-are-grounded-b... http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/29/technology/american-airlines...

Re: Some American Airlines planes are grounded because the pilots’ iPads crashed

#13
post #5

[deleted]

Why does it seem likely?

I've observed in the wild a few issues where updates to MDM software or bugs in applications crash iPads. MDM/MAM control layers usually have problems right after iOS releases.

AppStore apps can cause issues too. Chrome had an issue last year that crashed some of our iPad2s.

Re: Some American Airlines planes are grounded because the pilots’ iPads crashed

#14

Don't forget about the savings for American Airlines. No more paper maintenance manuals, saving lots of weight, on every flight. The ipad powering down will probably result in a claim to the supplier of the ipads. Of course it is embarrassing, but think of the environmental benefits of saving all that weight.

> all that weight

A few hundred grams? A few Kg?

Re: Some American Airlines planes are grounded because the pilots’ iPads crashed

#15

Don't forget about the savings for American Airlines. No more paper maintenance manuals, saving lots of weight, on every flight. The ipad powering down will probably result in a claim to the supplier of the ipads. Of course it is embarrassing, but think of the environmental benefits of saving all that weight.

> all that weight A few hundred grams? A few Kg?

Over hundreds of thousands of miles on thousands of flights. It must add up.

Re: Some American Airlines planes are grounded because the pilots’ iPads crashed

#16
post #10
post #5

[deleted]

Actually this seems extraordinarily unlikely. Your proposition is that a no-iOS zone was maliciously created in multiple highly secure and surveilled areas across the country (ie airports) but despite the fact that the hack should affect all iOS devices in range, there were no reports whatsoever of any passenger devices (nor the pilots iPhones for that matter) being disabled.

while I fully agree with your last part, the first part of your argument is dubious at best. it would be trivial to get away with a malicious access point in an airport. they helpfully provide charging stations for your electronics, and all it takes is an identically sized and shaped power brick to drop in a malicious access point.

see http://samy.pl/keysweeper/ but modified with wifi instead of bluetooth and you get the idea.

Re: Some American Airlines planes are grounded because the pilots’ iPads crashed

#17

Don't forget about the savings for American Airlines. No more paper maintenance manuals, saving lots of weight, on every flight. The ipad powering down will probably result in a claim to the supplier of the ipads. Of course it is embarrassing, but think of the environmental benefits of saving all that weight.

> all that weight A few hundred grams? A few Kg?

According to the link in the article:

http://hub.aa.com/en/nr/pressrelease/american-airlines-compl...

35 pounds, or around 16kg. That is rather heavy...

I'm thinking that they should not all carry iPads, but have one iPad and one other device from a different manufacturer running different software but with the same information, for redundancy purposes. The weight of carrying an iPad and backup device is still tiny compared to what it replaced.

Re: Some American Airlines planes are grounded because the pilots’ iPads crashed

#20
post #3

Can anybody here estimate the money lost due to late flights, crews, etc? I don't know where to start from but I'd love to compare it with the costs of keep using paper.

I'd like the estimate to include money and time lost by passengers, but that's probably hoping for too much.

The DOT actually has estimates of the value of time lost by passengers, used for economic analyses of delays. See this PDF, page 19:

http://www.dot.gov/sites/dot.dev/files/docs/vot_guidance_092...

Your time is worth $45-57 an hour, depending on if your travel is personal or business-related.

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