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

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121–124 of 124 posts

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

#121
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Leaving cockpit a few minutes. The horror! For an airliner, yes, the horror. Why would you want to downplay the dangers of pilots losing access to their flight manuals?

> Why would you want to downplay the dangers of pilots losing access to their flight manuals? If it happens at an actually critical time, they can have the ATC read the relevant sections to them.

Hmm, how do we fix the radio - dang, the iPad has crashed

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

#122

Why on earth would you entrust anything critical to a proprietary, consumer-grade product? Seems like a bad idea from the get-go...

Because it is not mission-critical in the first place. If you think the flight plans on the iPad is the sole critical factor in the overall flight operation, you're mistaken.

There are fallbacks, there are fallbacks even for the fallbacks and finally, the pilots themselves are trained in the event of total failures on all ends.

In addition, it was a software glitch. We don't know what kind of glitch it was but if it was, it doesn't matter if they were using proper-graded billion dollar worth of products, software glitches exist everywhere.

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

#123
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the app crashed. That was no doubt an app bug. The iPads also crashed. That's eyebrow-raising, and definitely an iPad glitch. The airline will fix the bug and it won't happen again. But relying on a closed, unauditable platform to keep any sort of safety-critical data in these conditions seems absolutely unconvincing to me.

I'm interested in a better solution/idea if you have any.

Picking an open source platform you can audit, like Linux (Android) for example.

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

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You got me curious. Can you explain? Etymologically there's no good word for map (mappa meant napkin, charta meant a sheet of paper) but 'tabula' was used in Classical times.

http://www.nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/mcd/learn_diff_map_chart.... Aeronautical charts extrapolate from this because being in command of an aircraft is really just commanding a different kind of vessel. Port, starboard, manifest, fix, captain, first officer, and hull are all valid aviation terms, for example, with roots in the sea. A chart is not a map.

Thank you! I'd have trouble explaining to someone what the precise difference is but now I can wear my consequentialist hat and explain that they are different because they are used differently.
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