Our iPads were unlocked at our airline (even went so far to tell us they’re ours to do with) until they decided to lock it down for company ops only. Can’t even put on your own background image!

 

We do have precedent for that. Sometimes the WDR has to be printed out at the gate, too, but it’s pretty nice not to need that every leg. Also, signing the FDRA electronically would save many headaches. (And I’d only have to carry my Apple Pencil...)

 

Yeah the act of signing it is asinine. If you pushback, you've accepted it at that point. If you throttle up for takeoff, you've accepted it at that point. Etc. Even from a chicken snitch liability perspective no one gains anything being able to say "AH HA!! You totally signed for it!!!!!!" Completely worthless procedure.

 

I think the A350 crews are testing an electronic FDRA. We'll see how that goes.

 

Update after first trip with iPad.

GPS works great on the ground, not good when airborne in the 320. It is probably on and accurate about 1/3 of the time. It appears as if the side window heat may be the issue. If you move it to the aft window it seems to work more often. Very nice on the ground. We do not have the Airport Moving Map option which would be even better.

Nothing ever locks up and the thing is fast. You can use Touch ID to open up from when it is locked and you can get into FD Pro in seconds basically.

Battery is way better. I worked a 2-leg 8:30 block day and had 35% left. I never attempted to save any battery. Did not have the FWV so it may need a charge if you had that running.

There are some issues with the HTML flight plan. If you open it from an e-mail link with Safari then the D-0 countdown timer won't work. To get that to work from an e-mail you have to open it from content locker. When you do that the hyperlinks don't work. It works great from the pop-up in safari, but if that gets closed then you have to open it from the e-mail. Not a big deal because once airborne you don't need the D-0 timer so you can open it from Safari and it works.

FD Pro is great, but the iPad version does not have the ability to select runways and departures or arrivals so you have to type those in.
FD Pro app is fast. You can go from one chart to another as fast as you can touch the screen....no drawing icon and it doesn't lock up a dozen times each leg. Never locked up or slowed down on me once. Nice..

At&t data is super fast. I found myself turning off wifi and using that because the wifi is almost always unreliable and slow when at a jetway. Nice not having to use my phone as a hotspot anymore. They are going to use up a ton of data though unless they get good wifi at the gates for us.

Massive improvement over the POS Surface. I think everyone knew it would be though so that's not big news.

 

When the time comes it will be tempting to buy my Surface, but only to break the effing thing in half over my knee as repayment for years of frustration.

 

If they tell us to just keep the surface I am going to call and offer them 100 dollars to just take the thing back. Can’t wait for the IPAD.
As far as the GPS issue in the cockpit it’s a known problem in almost any airliner. My understanding is Delta is going to provide a stand alone system to provide GPS inputs to the IPad for own ship positioning which will be fantastic, especially on the ground.

 

Don't do that. That's an intricate machine that deserves better:

 

Can any of the iPad volunteers chime in on this? I kind of assumed the company issued bad elf external GPS solution was only for the Surface devices. Are they still looking at augmenting the ipads with an external GPS receiver? I think it’s a great idea, it just seems too reasonable when our flt ops management seems more like a “let’s just see if the operating system update clears that up...” kind of reactive problem-solving team with regard to tech issues.

 

This was never suggested by anything I’ve read.