Aviation Pilot Duty and Performance Calculator app is for serious flyers.

The iPad has had a big impact on aviation. iPads are holding charts and other vital information for professional pilots eliminating thousands of printed pages that used to be pushed into heavy black flight bags.

Now, a pilot has written an app called the Aviation Pilot Duty and Performance Calculator to assist pilots operating under Part 135 (commuter and on-demand flight operations) that does a lot of the calculations that are laborious and time consuming. The app helps pilots compute things like Departure Gradients, Climb Performance, Approach Planning, keeping track of flight time and more.

Pilots operating under FAA part 91 (general aviation) and Part 121 (commercial pilots) will also find many of the features built into the app helpful.

The Aviation Pilot Duty and Performance Calculator is a reasonable US $4.99 and is a universal app that is optimized for the iPhone 5 and requires iOS 6.1 or later.

This app is not for the casual flyer, but if you make a living in the air it is an invaluable time saving tool.

Source: TUAW.

FCC proposes freeing up Wi-Fi for commercial aviation.

The Federal Communications Commission has unanimously voted in favor of taking comments on a proposal to free up 500MHz of the wireless spectrum for commercial aviation, in a move that could see Wi-Fi services on planes become faster, more reliable and cheaper.

Currently, only 4MhZ of the spectrum is used for ground-to-air services that allow some commercial airlines to provide in-flight broadband. Freeing up this much of the spectrum, relatively speaking, would see a huge boost the prominence of Wi-Fi usage on flights. It would make the service more reliable, faster and ultimately cheaper. With potential speeds of 300Gbps, expanding the spectrum would mean that, whilst passengers wouldn’t necessarily get those speeds, the service overall would be much, much better.

At least for the time being, Wi-Fi on planes isn’t going to be free, but if these proposals do come to fruition, it should make internet access on commercial airlines exponentially better.

Source: TodaysiPhone.

American Airlines Gets Full FAA Approval For iPads in Cockpits.

American Airlines has become the first commercial carrier to get Federal Aviation Administration approval to kit out their pilot’s ‘electronic flight bags’ with iPads for use in “all phases of flight”. The development was pointed out by Fantastical developer Michael Simmons on Twitter.

American’s pilots will be using the iPad, which is the only FAA-approved tablet as a replacement for paper-based reference manuals that weigh 35lbs. This will save AA an estimated $1.2M of fuel across all of its planes annually, based on current fuel prices.

“This is a very exciting and important milestone for all of us at American Airlines as we work to modernize our processes and best meet the needs of our people,” said Captain John Hale, American’s Vice President of Flight. “With this approval from the FAA, we will be able to use iPad to fully realize the benefits of our Electronic Flight Bag program, including improving the work environment for our pilots, reducing our dependency on paper products and increasing fuel efficiency on our planes. We are equipping our people with the best resources and this will allow our pilots to fly more efficiently.”

The airline says that it is also working on a program to kit out flight attendants with tablets, in order to give them better information about passengers.

The tablets in cockpits will use software by Jeppesen, which is used for gate-to-gate tracking throughout flights and presumably in takeoff and landing. So at least someone gets to use their tablets any time they want on a flight.

The iPads will be rolling out this month in AA’s 777 fleet. It will get approval for all fleet types by the end of 2012 and cease distributing revisions to its paper manuals in 2013. Every pilot and instructor is getting their own iPad in order to ‘ease the transition’ for use. This is a big expansion after they first got approval for use in cockpits in 2011.

Source: thenextweb.