FAA approves and bans iPads in commercial aircraft

[Gnarly Gnu]

"The Federal Aviation Administration said Tuesday that pilots on American Airlines flights would be allowed to use iPads instead of paper flight manuals in the cockpit starting Friday, as reported by ZDNet, even during takeoff and landing. But passengers are still required to shut down anything with the slightest electronic pulse from the moment a plane leaves the gate until it reaches an altitude of 10,000 feet."

[Guest davidh10]

Interesting and about time too. I wonder if they have to also carry the paper copies as a back-up?

 

I can still understand the ban on passengers using them, as they could not be trusted to disable any radio comminication (cell , WiFi, BlueTooth). After all that's why an "aircraft mode" has been introduced on phones and some other devices, so there's a quick simple way of turning all these transmitting modes off / on.

 

Even with all that, I've been on aircraft where someone's phone has received messages or incoming calls, so it was obviously on and active.

 

Although people may feel that radio signals are everywhere, remember that a commercial airliner is a partial faraday cage (ie significantly shields radio signals from the outside and contains the ones inside. Whenever you have two transmitters, then you also find "hetrodyne" frequencies (additive and difference frequencies) present in other surrounding electronic equipment. If you then look at a scenario where there are many devices inside the aircraft, all with signals bouncing around, there may be situations that arise and for which you could not test or predict or repeat.

 

Let's face it, modern airliners are pretty much flown by the computers and instruments. The pilots, as proven by recent accidents, have less and less input and deteriorating flying skills.

 

On the other hand, it isn't a big deal for us in our simple aircraft for which the electronic instruments are a nice to have, but not critical. Our issue is only whether we put information on electronic devices that we then depend on having available in the air.