During 2013, American Airlines made the decision to replace the maps in the cockpit with iPad tablets which contain applications with the same information, but also many, many others. The airline, like many others, made the decision to free the planes of several tens of KG represented by all the maps that the pilots had to use.
Although the idea itself is great and was appreciated by the company's pilots, during the day yesterday a bug in the software of the tablets kept multiple planes of the airline on the ground. Those from American Airlines they did not provide a clear explanation for the problem, but it seems that the iPad tablets started to display white screens instead of the maps available in the applications.
To partially solve the problem, the pilots or co-pilots had to return to the boarding gate of the airports to reconnect to the special Wi-Fi networks, multiple types of planes being affected. At the root of the problem would have been a simple update released for the application used by the tablets on the planes, according to a pilot, and it seems that some flights were delayed by up to 4 hours because of it.
SOME FLIGHTS ARE EXPERIENCING AN ISSUE WITH A SOFTWARE APPLICATION ON PILOT IPADS. WE'LL HAVE INFO ABOUT YOUR DEPARTURE SOON. In some cases, the flight has had to return to the gate to access a Wi-Fi connection to fix the issue. We apologize for the inconvenience to our customers. We are working to have them on the way to their destination as soon as possible.
Considering that American Airlines has over 8000 active iPad tablets within its company, most of them in the cockpits, a problem of this kind can be extremely dangerous for pilots and co-pilots. Considering that it is based on an update, only the planes that had not taken off after its implementation were affected, so that all those in flight could continue their routes without problems.
Although the iPad tablets were bought with the idea of making the pilots' work more efficient, unfortunately they can have a very dangerous impact on the safety of the planes and there will definitely be detailed investigations.
