Air Force to Buy Up to 18,000 Tablets to Replace Flight Bags

[del35]

iPad 2, a tablet lacking connectivity user serviceability and not permitting battery replacement-- a routine flight can last longer than 10 hours.... They should have gone with a tablet sporting better hardware especially since so many of them cost much less than the iPad 2.

 

[del35]

I smell some problems ahead.

Some airforce relevant pecs on the iPad 2:

Operating temperature: 32° to 95° F (0° to 35° C)
Nonoperating temperature: -4° to 113° F (-20° to 45° C)
Relative humidity: 5% to 95% noncondensing
Maximum operating altitude: 10,000 feet (3000 m) *******

 

[nebun]

[citation][nom]elkein[/nom]Wrong; believe it or not flight bags are heavy, the ipads will save their cost in fuel alone in a few days.[/citation]
how many paper manuals are in a flight bag? what happens when the tablet decides to quit on you? where is the paper manual, you wish you had one, but wait you can't because you don't have one on hand....it's a waste, like it or not it's the truth.

 

[lauxenburg]

Yeah I was going to say...I doubt they would use any type of consumer tablet. Probably design their own, or have a consumer tablet made to military specification.

If the information on these books is mission-critical (and I don't know if it is), then I'm fairly certain that they would have be mil-spec, atleast.

 

[Tab54o]

[citation][nom]sirmorluk[/nom]As a person who was in the Army pre-I.T. revolution and in Army I.T. as a civilian afterwards you would be shocked at the amount waste that goes on in every aspect of government. It is sickening. It was so bad and made me so angry my health started to suffer from stress. Just one example: I was instructed to destroy $300,000 of tablet computers (fujitsu) that were 1 year old because the RAM was too small for the latest version of software they were running.I recommended a simple $40/tablet RAM upgrade to bring them up to spec. I was laughed at and told to proceed with the destruction. Sure enough they ordered brand new ones @ $1,500 apiece and crushed the old ones. I loved helping our troops but cannot work for the bureaucracy. this type of waste was not unique and I cite only one of many that I saw.[/citation]

I would have loaded them up in my truck and taken them home.

 

[zippyzion]

Having been in the Air Force and having seen what those pilots carry I do not see the reason that they should get them before other parts of their same force do. At my job alone we had equipment that required 4 large binders to hold all the technical manuals needed to service them. We had bookshelves of those manuals. It would have saved time to be able to search for keywords or keep bookmarks of most used areas because you can't write in them or mark in them or you could be accused of defacing govt property.

I also have a personal opinion that they baby those pilots and wipe their asses for them but that's another discussion.

My point is that they need to put technology into hands that can make better use of it first. After that they can buy the pilots their toys. Personally I think their books could be slimmed down quite a bit by just asking those computers in the plane to do just a little bit more. Let's face it, the way they make planes today, if those computers aren't working you are jumping out.