Amaya Toman The iPad is a great work tool not only for professionals in the field of design or IT, but also for pilots. They know this well, for example, at Singapore Airlines, where they introduced apple tablets in the cockpits of their planes three years ago. Today, advancements have made iPads even more useful for airlines.
The people at Singapore Airlines know very well how demanding a pilot's job is. It includes a lot of various duties, administration and paperwork. Airlines have decided to make their work a little easier for their pilots and have developed special applications for the iPad.
iPads used by airlines contain a pair of basic custom applications: FlyNow and Roster. They are secured with TouchID, so pilots don't have to worry about the two-factor authentication they used in the past.
The Roster application is a very useful companion for pilots. They provide them with an overview of upcoming scheduled flights, types of aircraft and types of passenger classes. Another important function is information about hours flown. The official limit is one hundred hours per month, and until now pilots had to log them manually. In addition, Roster can also inform pilots about the approaching expiration of their visas, offers the possibility of sharing an upcoming flight with family members, and the possibility of monitoring the flight schedule of colleagues.
The FlyNow app, on the other hand, provides key information about routes, weather forecasts or fuel. Both applications are synchronized with the airlines' backend servers and their operation is simple and intuitive.
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According to Singapore Airlines, pilots should master not only the technology, but also the necessary administration and paperwork. They are used to following to-do lists, so the developers tried to adapt the respective applications as much as possible to this habit. In turn, the application borrowed a trick from the user interface of early web browsers that helps distinguish passive information from interactive content. “We told the pilots that everything yellow is interactive and tappable,” says Captain Raj Kumar, B777 Division Deputy Pilot. The yellow elements are not included in the application by chance - they stand out from the blue background in the same way as blue links from a white background in old web browsers.
In the future, the airlines would like to automate even more processes and add in-flight connectivity to ground data exchange. Captain Raj Kumar revealed that along with automation will come all sorts of cockpit improvements. Cabins of older aircraft models will be additionally equipped with USB ports for charging iPads, secure flight connectivity will also be introduced, thanks to which the staff will receive up-to-date information during the flight. The first airlines to introduce iPads were American Airlines in 2013. British Airways, United and Jet Blue followed.
Source: CNet
