iPad tablets have been used in airplanes by pilots for several years to replace maps, or various other types of documents, and now an airline shows us how important they are for pilots. Singapore Airlines is the company that praises Apple's iPad tablets, saying that the pilots see real-time weather forecasts, maps with the routes they have to follow, and not only that.
Since 2015, Singapore Airlines has started to investigate the possibility of using iPads instead of classic documents in planes, special applications, secured with Touch ID, being used by pilots. They can have flight manuals, plus a multitude of other flight information available on the iPad, real-time warnings from various authorities, and can communicate more easily with company representatives.
iPad tablets make Pilots' Life much Simpler
The iPad tablets also help Singapore Airlines to keep track of the hours flown by the pilots every month, the limit being 100, and until now they had to keep their records themselves. Moreover, pilots can share information about upcoming flights with family members, so that they know in real time where they are going to fly, all directly from their tablets.
The airline started looking into this back in 2015, before rolling out iPads loaded with two essential custom apps, FlyNow and Roster. These iPads are secured with Apple's TouchID, letting them ditch the previously used two-factor authentication dongles pilots had to carry around. An important feature is the number of hours flown — the legal limit is 100 hours a month, and pilots used to have to manually track it themselves. Other features include the option to share upcoming flights with a family member. And users can view the rosters of fellow pilots, making it easier to arrange a meetup with a colleague on off days.
Singapore Airlines tried to make the applications as similar as possible to the documentation that the pilots had in front of them all the time, so that they would not have to learn many new procedures. Until now, those from Singapore Airlines were satisfied with the results they had after replacing the physical documentation with iPad tablets, without taking into account the large number of kilograms that disappeared from the cockpit.
