United Airlines Invests in 11,000 iPads

[JMcEntegart]

All United and Continental pilots will be armed with iPads before the year is out.

United Airlines Invests in 11,000 iPads : Read more

 

[Pyree]

They will have several ipad as backup right? Wouldn't trust any electronic hardware to do with flying without redundancy.

 

[jldevoy]

of course not, whats the problem with entrusting everyones safety to a $499 device with a consumer OS that may or may not function reliably over the long term in a pressurised environment.

 

[steelbox]

I would be bad if a flight would be limited to only one pad, the co-pilot should have his own, mirroring the pilot's information, the engineer should also have his with the same information as the pilot plus his own data.

 

[jcesmi]

They better make sure they turn them off before and during flight, or lese it will mess up the navigation guidance system..... Oh Wait.....

 

[erhardm]

Nothing bad about hardware, but nothing great neither. Maybe they should test for reliability. Test the circuit, the battery, it could maybe someday after years of use start a fire.

About the OS, I think it should be MANDATORY RTOS. Not some _iOS_pretty_and_shinny_look_how_great_angry_birds_it_plays

 

[Guest]

Somehow I doubt the green benefits. So the Ipad is "free" to produce?

 

[apache_lives]

More importantly is battery life, stolen property and above all thats bugging me:

DO AIRCRAFT HAVE CIGARETTE LIGHTER POWER SOCKETS IN THE COCKPITS TO RECHARGE THINGS WITH!?!?!??!!??

 

[del35]

This is scary. Airlines purchasing a device for pilots to read manuals in with no user replaceable batteries and lacking connectivity. They would have done much better getting an Android tablet like the Toshiba Thrive.

 

[nebun]

...plane crashes...so what were you doing...i was playing on my pad...stupid i tell you....they need to invest in more legroom not iPads...

 

[alidan]

[citation][nom]jldevoy[/nom]of course not, whats the problem with entrusting everyones safety to a $499 device with a consumer OS that may or may not function reliably over the long term in a pressurised environment.[/citation]

planes are pressurized to what we normally have on the surface.
and if its just looking at pictures, and reading, the ipad can more or less be trusted with that, and worse come to worse, you have trained pilots and radios and radar for a reason.

[citation][nom]jcesmi[/nom]They better make sure they turn them off before and during flight, or lese it will mess up the navigation guidance system..... Oh Wait.....[/citation]

this is largely a myth, but some instruments ARE effected by that kind of equipment. however out of 10 phones, only 1 may screw with 1 dial, you blanket the ban on everything just to make it easier to regulate, and not have to be knowledgeable of 1000+ types of phones.
[citation][nom]apache_lives[/nom]More importantly is battery life, stolen property and above all thats bugging meO AIRCRAFT HAVE CIGARETTE LIGHTER POWER SOCKETS IN THE COCKPITS TO RECHARGE THINGS WITH!?!?!??!!??[/citation]

an external battery that can keep it going for 24+ hours shouldn't be to hard to acquire/make.


all that said, they are doing away with 418000lbs of material.
and lets say it costs 10$ per 200 pages, thats 600$ a book, the ipad actually payed for itself. in multiple ways.

 

[donovands]

Whoa whoa whoa. Let's not get hasty! You can't drop a manual and render it useless. A coffee spill is likewise no biggie. A lot of places still use paper because it's extremely dependable. Use the iPads fine, but I'd feel more comfortable if there was hardcopy backup.

 

[zoemayne]

this is so stupid they are still using paper they could of began using at least notebook computers 10 years ago. nothing revolutionary about the ipad.

 

[Guest]

This is a positive step forward for this legacy airline. Fortunately for my airline, JetBlue, we've had a totally paperless flight deck FOR ELEVEN YEARS!!!! Only it isn't iPads...it's laptops, yup, full-blown, fully-functional, very capable laptop computers....FOR ELEVEN YEARS!!!! The industry has kinda caught up to JetBlue and now it's time for JetBlue to take it to another level. Standby folks, the techno war will heat up.
....The Great Eduardo

 

[sundaymarch1056]

I don't think that's such a good idea replacing reliable paper with an iPad. What if the iPad's data gets corrupted?

 

[jsc]

[citation][nom]jcesmi[/nom]They better make sure they turn them off before and during flight, or lese it will mess up the navigation guidance system..... Oh Wait.....[citation]
Well, at least we now know that iPads can be safwly used throughout the flight.

[nom]steelbox[/nom]I would be bad if a flight would be limited to only one pad, the co-pilot should have his own, mirroring the pilot's information, the engineer should also have his with the same information as the pilot plus his own data.[/citation]
That and make sure that the iPads and their batteries come from different production lots in the same aircraft.[/citation]

 

[rosen380]

I wonder how much faster it is to search for a particular piece of information on an electronic device like an iPad than to find that same info among 12000 sheets of paper? Might be a pretty decent time saver in emergencies where every second counts?

 

[killerclick]

[citation][nom]steelbox[/nom]I would be bad if a flight would be limited to only one pad, the co-pilot should have his own, mirroring the pilot's information, the engineer should also have his with the same information as the pilot plus his own data.[/citation]

There are no more engineers on most flights, grandpa.

 

[Guest]

So, if the pilots are using these during take off and landing, do I have to turn off mine? Are they going to say "You must now turn off all electronic items......except for ipads." This is so stupid that they have you do this. Can this double standard be any more hypocritical?

 

[rosen380]

Is it possible that these aren't truly off-the-shelf iPads and have some kind of extra EM shielding or whatever to ensure that they don't interfere with the cockpit instruments?