Several dozen American Airlines planes are grounded because the pilots’ iPads crashed
 

From AA's twitter feed:

They're late because they don't have an iWatch yet...

No paper maps on board?
 

Good job they were still on the ground. Reminds me of a time some years when a Jaguar prototype from Warton went to an airshow on east coast. The very new nav system crashed on return leg and pilot had no paper maps as backup. Many red faces as he had to request radar headings all the way home.

More and more airlines are investing in this technology because it is easier and cheaper for the airline. I think headlines like this are going to be a common feature of the daily news.

Probably a reason why the authority requires a lengthy testing period in which we use two different EFB systems side by side, the old windows xp based one which served us well for nearly 15 years and the new iPad based one. If one goes belly up the other one is still available. Haven't had paper charts on board for more than 10 years now.

The iPad seems to face issues with pilots involuntary upgrading every time a new version of either the iOS or an application becoming available, even if it is not cleared by the company yet. For example we cannot upgrade to iOS 8.3 yet as the airbus apps won't work with it.

Compared to XP or anything from Microsoft, iOS is the most stable of them all. Perhaps the EFB apps were to blame, and agreed with Denti that a willy-nilly OS upgrade may have led to app issues. (leaving one behind the other opening unforeseen holes in software design)

Can you use the AC charger that comes with the ipad or does it have to be something that is aviation certified?

That'll be why NASA now use Linux on the ISS. That and XP is no longer supported.

Another symptom of the general issue of overdependence on automation.

Might be, however iOS inherently allows a lot of end-user input. XP can be configured to prevent that and only allow whatever the administrator wants you to use. If those PCs are not connected to the internet then there is no real danger. Our windows EFBs only use an airline programmed UI, there is no possibility to get into windows itself for the normal user. Only thing i don't like about that installation are those damn military grade tablet PCs that are real heavy and have a very bad input technology.

iPads are nice to work with of course, however the software issues can be a real headache. There is no single point update so each app and the OS have to be updated separately and each possible combination has to be thoroughly tested with usually means that approval to update the OS version can sometimes take a long time.

It works, if it is approved depends on your specific aircraft installation.

And are we really ready for:

"Seventeen pilotless planes crash as controller server reboots following a failed update" :ugh:

Eggs in one basket
 

I would be very surprised if its just individuals randomly updating their iPads which caused this. Something which 'appears' to be fairly widespread, and happened in a relatively short period of time, looks more like it had been initiated from a centralised source, via an update or something - who knows! Yes it would be interesting to know if this only affected flights which were still on the ground?

From the BBC:

On many aircraft you can charge from outlets available on the flight deck using the Apple charger but this sort of thing has to be approved by the feds for each carrier and each specific aircraft type from what I've seen. Also, most operators are required to have a backup battery carried for the iPads. I say 'most' since so much of this stuff seems to depend on how the carrier's PI (Principal Inspector) interprets AC 120-76C (see: http://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/m...AC_120-76C.pdf ).

Here is Apple's list of iPad battery safety certifications for compliance with AC 120-76C:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204509

From talking with colleagues, the level of user control of what goes onto the iPads seems to vary widely. Some carriers say 'you are adults, make sure the required aviation apps are working, the rest is up to you'. Others have the iPad locked down so that it will do little more than run company approved apps. If there is a mishap or other reportable incident recent experience shows that the feds will harvest stuff off the company PED (Portable Electronic Device in FAA-speak).

As always, some idiot will try to 'jailbreak' the company iPad and folks will used unauthorized GPS's, bluetooth headphones and speakers and watch movies while they are supposed to be flying the plane.

Some airlines have weather and flight plans uplinked to the iPads (and FMS's), others cut costs by having the overpaid pilots tediously type everything back in the old fashioned way from faded dot matrix printer output. Don't know about AA. Was it just the data link that failed perhaps?

This report says the AA B-737's were affected and some flights had to taxi back to get into wifi range of the terminal:

Fondleslab deaths grounded ALL of American Airlines' 737s ? The Register

Bad Data?
 

That's the theory some people on a software board are suggesting. That it happened simultaneously on both a pilot's and first officer's iPads suggests that they reached some point on a checklist which called for opening a particular page. And that page's file was corrupt.

Frankly, I'm surprised that the data download process doesn't include a checksum verification (and maybe a signed electronic certificate). You'd want the system to upchuck corrupt data at the time of download, where it might be fixed easily. Not after you've pushed back from the gate.

And then there's the question of why the reading application shuts down the iPad rather than handling the error gracefully.
:8

And the fact that the problem was found on perhaps only B-737's around the same time is another possible clue.

Again, I don't know how they do it at AA, but at some airlines, it seems only one of the iPad's has the 4G/LTE cellular data connection (to save costs, of course) and the data is transferred to the other tablet using AirDrop. I heard an RJ crew discussing this scheme on the hotel van a few weeks back.

The Jepp FD-Pro iPad app is buggy and still very much a work in progress in my opinion. I've done a chart update on an overseas hotel wifi system only to later find out that all of the approach plate headings and page numbers were listed but every chart rendered as a blank page. :eek:

I couldn't redo the update since the app showed it had already been updated. Jepp product support was offline during non-business hours in DEN. And my company IT person was more clueless than me. I ended up removing the Jepp app and reinstalling from scratch. And then doing the updates.

I agree that the error checking on this stuff is not yet what you would expect if you bought a $1.99 game app from the Apple Store.

Crashed iPads ground several American Airlines flights - SlashGear

Since these news reports use, uh, non-technical terms like 'tarmac' and 'first mates' it's hard to tell in my opinion whether the 'blank screen' mentioned was possibly a faulty Jepp update like I experienced or a system crash of the iPad.

Hopefully some AA folks will chime in here so we can all learn from this snag.

The Jepp TC Pro app would automatically close when trying to launch. The problem was traced down to only users that had a specific airport saved in their "Favorites". The fix was to reset the iPad to an earlier date, launch Jepp TC Pro, and then delete the offending location from "Favorites". Charts for that location were pushed to all pilots using another application until a fix is found. The iPads operate normally after this interim process is followed.

X

It wasn't only a 737 problem.

This is truly the End Of Days.

I would ride my bicycle home now, but I don't have an "app" for that. I'll Twitter about my lack of a bicycle app just as soon as I finish updating my Facebook status.
OBTW, any suggestions on the hash tag?