Kind of weird, there historically have been similar 'do it the old school way because its more reliable' fallbacks for other things in air transport. What happened to the planes that were mid flight when this bug occurred?
AFAIK this is more of a regulatory thing than a direct safety issue. This has to work to be allowed to take off. When in flight though, they have no choice but to keep flying.
The device not working could have become an issue if something unexpected happened though.
It is outrageous that flights could be stopped because of a reliance of shiny iThings and the software running on them.
Paper versions do not run out of juice.
There is a place for shiny tech, but the flight deck is not it. Paper worked, and we should go back to it.
Paper comprises an entire suitcase. Charts, airport docs, aircraft manuals, maint logs, regulations, etc etc. Updates are frequent and also paper. The fuel savings alone from not carrying the paper is substantial. As long as there's a backup tablet, it should be okay. If they get lost they can always call in for vectors.
Well, airlines have to very aggressively optimise for efficiency with everything they do. They have huge revenues and very little in the way of profit (about 5%).
It'd be foolish for them to not save money when they can.
> An Electronic Flight Bag, which replaces more than 35 pounds of paper-based reference material and manuals that pilots often carried in their carry-on kitbag, offers numerous benefits for American and its pilots.
> ... removing the kitbag from all of our planes saves a minimum of 400,000 gallons and $1.2 million of fuel annually based on current fuel prices. Additionally, each of the more than 8,000 iPads we have deployed to date replaces more than 3,000 pages of paper previously carried by every active pilot and instructor. Altogether, 24 million pages of paper documents have been eliminated
> ... All American pilots now enjoy the benefits associated with replacing their heavy kitbags – one of the airline's biggest sources of pilot injuries – with a 1.35-pound iPad. The digital format also requires less time to update each of the six or more paper manuals found in each pilot's kitbag, as manual paper revisions take hours to complete every month, compared to the minutes it takes for electronic updates.
All the threats mentioned there - jamming, spoofing, impersonation, etc. - can already happen with the unencrypted radio calls it's supplementing. With a hundred dollars or so worth of radio, you can hop on your local airport's ATC frequency and hold the mic down, or pose as the controller.
I suppose the argument is, when there's a person in the loop it's easier to notice funny business. If someone hops on the ATC frequency, the odds are someone will notice more quickly.
When it's mediated by a computer, you tend to trust it as a magic box of truth- and injecting subtle errors is going to be easier with ADS-B than on a voice channel, isn't it?
Aircraft approaches are issued every 90 days. To stay up to date you need to have a book of these 'plates' for every region of the U.S, or a subscription to a service that sends you paper updates. If this happened in flight they would either get ATC to read them the plate, or check with ATC that whatever outdated plate they had was still accurate.
Obviously though this is a pretty big technical error on the part of Jeppeson (the app provider). It's pretty clear that it shouldn't be possible for the apps to stop working due to something done remotely. There is another provider, called ForeFlight, which I think does a better job, and I was glad to see they weren't involved.
Thanks for elaborating on the issue. I didn't know that the approaches are issued in that short time-interval. That makes the use of an app like this at least comprehensible.
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