Keep iPads out of the cockpit – no one needs pilots watching Netflix adverts
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Version 0 of 1. I use my iPad for many things. I watch football matches on it. I listen to the radio on it. I rest coffee cups on it. One thing I do not use it for is flying a plane. That is something that differentiates me from, say, American Airlines, which had to ground “a few dozen” flights on Tuesday after a malfunction with its pilots’ iPads. The idea that an iPad could malfunction will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever operated an iPad. My iPad football match watching is regularly interrupted by malfunction. As is my iPad radio listening. And once a coffee cup fell off my iPad, although that may not have been the iPad’s fault. “Some flights are experiencing an issue with a software application on pilot iPads,” American Airlines said in a statement. “In some cases, the flight has had to return to the gate to access a WiFi connection to fix the issue.” American Airlines pilots have been using iPads to store crucial flight data, such as flight plans and maps, since 2013. According to the airline, pilots using the iPads instead of the 35lb paper manuals they were required to carry before saves 400,000 gallons of fuel annually. But there is something inherently disconcerting about the idea that the pilot of your plane is sitting up there in the cockpit twiddling around with a few iPad apps, muttering “damn it” to himself as he opens the wrong one and is suddenly confronted by a Netflix advert for a Jason Statham film – that the pilot of your plane is up there squinting at a screen covered in fingerprints and pizza grease, holding the iPad in both hands and turning it through 180 degrees like a steering wheel because he can’t turn off auto-rotate. American Airlines has stressed that the failure was not the fault of the iPad itself. Some third-party software had failed. But that’s just the point isn’t it? An iPad uses lots of third-party software. And that third-party software tends to fail. So why use iPads at all? The business case for ditching the old paper system seems a little spurious. It is easy to believe that dropping 35lb could save 400,000 gallons of fuel. American Airlines flies a lot of planes. It’s just hard to believe those savings couldn’t come from somewhere else. The airline could get the pilot and co-pilot to drop 17.5lb each, for example. Or serve rice crackers instead of aeroplane food. Or not stock so many different cans of fizzy pop. Or ditch a couple of life jackets. The fuel saving claim aside, there is just something more reassuring about a good old-fashioned paper system. That’s 35lb of paper they’re packing. The weight of a four-year-old human child, or a six-month-old labrador dog. Even if a pilot loses a few pages, or spills Dr Pepper all over his bag, there’s still got to be something in there of use. Maybe the thing that is most unnerving about having pilots rely on iPads for flights is the way we see iPads being used everywhere else. Whether it’s that group of tourists using an iPad to photograph themselves in front of the Lincoln memorial, or the smug artists in the most recent Apple TV advert, or me slumped on my sofa watching Crank for the third time, we’re used to seeing the iPad as a fun, time-wasting, occasionally depressing device. Let’s keep it that way. Let’s keep it pure. Let’s bring back the 35lb of paper. |