FAA approves iPads in the cockpit; American Airlines to start Friday
In June the Allied Pilots Association noted that American Airlines (AA) conducted the first tests of iPads for all phases of flight. AA pilots received Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) approval to test iPads …
Context & Ripple Effects
The FAA has been walking the iPad into the cockpit step by step through 2011: first the February approval of iPads for pilots' charts, then Alaska Airlines' May move to ditch paper flight manuals entirely. What changes with this story is scope — American Airlines' pilots now have approval for all phases of flight, not just chart reference, following tests the Allied Pilots Association noted in June.
American is also arriving late but at scale: Delta began deploying iPads as electronic flight bag replacements back in August, so three major carriers have now made the tablet a certified cockpit tool within a single year.
First-order effects
- American Airlines pilots can retire paper flight bags from Friday, replacing printed charts and manuals with an approved iPad across every phase of flight.
- Apple gains its highest-stakes enterprise endorsement yet in aviation — a consumer tablet now carries regulatory sign-off inside AA cockpits.
Second-order effects
- Delta and Alaska's earlier deployments stop being experiments and become the competitive baseline, pressuring remaining major carriers to seek their own FAA approvals or explain why their pilots still carry paper.
- The FAA shifts from approving one airline's test program to processing a queue of similar requests, forcing it to formalize how consumer tablets are certified for operational use.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the paper flight bag becomes a legacy artifact across commercial aviation, and the regulator's role moves from certifying devices case-by-case toward certifying the software and update processes that keep cockpit data current.
- Airlines gain a new dependency on consumer hardware vendors and their software supply chains — a structural exposure that did not exist when flight bags were printed.
The trend: Commercial aviation is converting from paper-based flight bags to consumer tablets, with FAA approvals in 2011 turning a per-airline experiment into an industry-wide migration.