It’s no secret that the iPad is popular with pilots. TUAW has provided coverage of pilot kneeboards for holding iPads in the cockpit, many iPhone apps for pilots that are now making their way to the big(ger) screen, and we’ve heard from commenters who fly for a living that they think the iPad may be the greatest thing to appear in the cockpit since Charlton Heston.
One British firm is now starting to use iPads as electronic flight bags, although not on “real” aircraft. The company, Virtual Aviation, operates Airbus and Boeing full-motion flight simulators at London Heathrow and Gatwick airports. While these expensive and realistic simulators are most often used for pilot training, Virtual Aviation also provides public experience flights and corporate team-building events.
Read more: TUAW.com
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First let me say that I am a commercial jet pilot and I have an iPad.
I don’t think iPads displaying IFR approach and departure plates in the cockpit of real airplanes is workable, for a number of important reasons:
1. The FAA won’t let you just carry your iPad with its plates installed on it into the cockpit on an actual instrument (IFR) flight because they (FAA) require you to still carry paper plates as a back up. If your iPad stopped working and you were on a real IFR flight you’d be in deep trouble trying to complete your flight – so you need paper approach plates as a backup.
2. The amount of storage space needed to hold the IFR plates may exceed the available storage space of an iPad. You can buy regional IFR plate coverage or whole US coverage but even regional coverage is a huge amount of data and I think would tax even the 64k model of the iPad. When you purchase electronic IFR plates you have to purchase all of a regional area. You wouldn’t want to purchase just a few airports in case you had to divert to another airport – you’d want to make sure you had that airports plates. So buying anything less than regional coverage wouldn’t be very smart. So I think storage could be a big problem for the iPad. But there are other reasons below that make this point moot.
2. What kind of plates are installed on your iPad? There are only two companies providing these plates: Jeppesen JeppCharts and the US Government’s NACO plates. The plates are free from the Government and cost money from Jeppesen. Jepp does offer electronic plates so you could get them from them. I don’t know if the Gov plates are available in electronic form or not. Almost all commercial airlines use Jepp plates in either paper or electronic form.
3. Any device used in IFR flying (on instruments) to display approach plates has to be FAA approved and at this time the iPad is not and probably will not be. The FAA approval process is time consuming and very expensive. Will Apple pay to certify their iPad with the FAA? In a word: no.
Therefore, using the iPad to display approach plates in a simulator is probably the only place you’ll ever see that being done 🙂
I am a pilot for a fractional jet company. To address the comments by rfresh…
1) We currently have a “paperless cockpit”. Other than the aircraft manuals and vfr/ifr enroute charts, we have all the company documents and Jepp terminal charts on EFBs. If the iPad were approved by the FAA, all you would likely have to do is have the redundancy of two iPads.
2) I have the Jepp software on my laptop. I believe the subscription is for all the charts Jepp has to offer for world coverage. The installation, including the software that displays the charts, is barely over 1.5 GB. What is the smallest iPad? 16 or 32 GB?
3)For NACO charts, check out http://www.foreflight.com/index.php. Jepp charts are another story. They don’t seem to be in too big of a hurry to get their charts available on any apple products in the near future.
4)This is a good point. Certification in aviation causes an $800 product to quickly become a $3000 product. However, it has been done before with other EFB products and I’m sure someone will do it again.
When I started skydiving, our mentor said that “students would never use the square (ram air) parachutes”. Guess what…I don’t think you will find a training center, other than the military, that throws people out of planes with anything other than a modern square parachute.
Never say never.
Fly