FCC Tells FAA To Allow More Electronic Devices On Planes

Julius Genachowski, Chairman of the FCC, is pushing for the rules regarding the use of electronic devices to be relaxed in-flight. In a letter to Michael Huerta, acting administrator of the FAA, he has asked the aviation body to "enable greater use of tablets, e-readers and other portable devices." Electric shavers, hearing aids, portable voice recorders, and pacemakers are, of course, permitted.
This comes a few months after the aviation body announced it would undertake a study on the subject, although it concluded that "voice communications" during the duration of a flight were still verboten. The FAA is still strict about allowing passengers to use their devices during take-off and landing, despite the fact that there is still no evidence that the electronics on personal gadgets are as much a danger to avionic systems as, say, a flock of geese.

Credit : Fast Company

FAA flips video guy the bird

A Delta passenger who filmed a bird strike at JFK says he’s being targeted by the embarrassed feds just because he shot the footage with his iPad during takeoff.
“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” said Grant Cardone, an LA-based business consultant whose video of birds being sucked into an engine of LA-bound Delta Flight 1063 on April 19 has become a TV and Internet sensation. The plane turned back and landed safely.
Among those who saw his video were FAA inspectors, who slapped him with an official letter complaining he took the video illegally because portable electronic devices must be turned off during “critical” phases of a flight, such as takeoffs, and can’t be used during an in-flight emergency.

“Your failure to comply with flight attendant instructions during a critical phase of flight and an aircraft emergency could have affected the safe outcome of the flight,” the letter says.
Cardone doesn’t buy that.
“If there is even a minute chance that an iPad could take a plane down then it is the FAA’s obligation to ban the devices from flights or require the airlines to confiscate them when you check in,” he said.
The FAA said Cardone, 54, won’t be fined — but the letter “will be made a matter of record for a period of two years.”
“A record with whom?” asked Cardone, a frequent flier who is worried that he’s on some no-fly list. He said the letter “has a lot of Big Brother in it.

Credit - NY Post

Aviation - iPad gets approval from FAA to replace paper flight charts and maps

The Federal Aviation Administration is moving with the times, it would seem, as it has just granted the first approval for the use of iPads instead of paper charts for informing airline pilots while on duty. There are already a number of EFB (electronic flight bag) devices in use, however the iPad is by far the cheapest and most portable one that's been validated yet. Executive Jet Management, a charter flight operator, went through three months of testing with the iPad, wherein it was used by 55 pilots on 250 flights, in order to obtain its FAA license to rely exclusively on the Apple tablet for its in-flight mapping data. Other airlines will have to go through the same process in order to dump their big stacks of paper charts for a slinky slate, but the important thing is that the precedent has been set. As to redundancies in case of failure or a software crash, the likeliest scenario is that pilots will carry a spare iPad with them, though there wasn't even a single (software) crash during the trial period -- which also included rapid decompression and electronic interference testing. So there you have it, the iPad's found itself a grown-up job just in time to retire from its throne as consumer sales leader.