Don't forget about the savings for American Airlines. No more paper maintenance manuals, saving lots of weight, on every flight. The ipad powering down will probably result in a claim to the supplier of the ipads. Of course it is embarrassing, but think of the environmental benefits of saving all that weight.
35 pounds, or around 16kg. That is rather heavy...
I'm thinking that they should not all carry iPads, but have one iPad and one other device from a different manufacturer running different software but with the same information, for redundancy purposes. The weight of carrying an iPad and backup device is still tiny compared to what it replaced.
> and one other device from a different manufacturer running different software but with the same information, for redundancy purposes
This sounds like a great idea in theory, but as far as I know in practice isn't ideal. Problems include less familiarity with the second system/more training time required, issues with the second system may not be discovered since it's used less, and less incentive to get the first system right in the first place.
What would perhaps be better is a backup running a previous software version, maybe.
> they didn't have any contingency plan as backup.
Do you have any Source of your claim that there was no contingency plan?
FAA regulations seems to indicate that there are plans:
"(5) Procedural means.
g. Procedural Mitigations. If one or more onboard EFBs fail, resulting in loss of function
or the presentation of false or hazardously misleading information, a contingency plan or process
will need to be in place to provide the required information."
The same articles says:
"The pilot told us when they were getting ready to take off, the iPad screens went blank, both for the captain and copilot, so they didn’t have the flight plan,” " (emphasis mine)
What I meant is taht they didn't have a second electronic contingency plan. Probably they had to switch to paper on those flights (otherwise the impact would have been minimal)
My wife works as cabin crew for a major international airline. A few years ago she was grateful that they abolished the requirement that all crew (an A380 has around 30 crew) had to bring their manuals for every flight. The book was about 3kg and rather bulky so took up most of the room in her flight bag where she was also supposed to keep a jacket, jumper, pair of shoes (they switch from heels when boarding to flats during flight), hat, make up and various bits of documentation.
Which sounds like BS / urban legend. $40.000 for (generously) 1 gram x 300 passengers = less than a pound per flight?
[UPDATE] not sure for fuel, but might be true in olive prices, given these numbers:
Their website says 6,700 flights per day. Let's round it to 6000.
6,000 flights a day -> It's 2,190,000 flights a year x 100 meals per flight x 1 olive saved -> 219,000,000 olives saved.
This list http://sizes.com/food/olives.htm gives about 80-150 olives per pound (depending on the kind of olives), let's say 120 on average.
This makes 219,000,000 olives -> 1,825,000 pounds.
If they get them in bulk for like $1 or even $0.1 per pound, that's still an impressive $182,500 saved per year!
(Not sure if all flights include meals though. I used 100 meals per flight as a guesstimation could be higher/lower depending on the duration of most flights and the percs included).
I don't know how accurate that is, but it passes a basic smell test for me.
An olive is about 6 grams, so the per-olive fuel consumption is about 0.0001 gallons. Jet fuel currently costs about $1.70/gallon, so that's about 0.017 cents per olive in fuel.
To save $40,000 in fuel per year by reducing olives, you'd be flying about 200 million fewer olives.
American flies about 500 million passengers per year, so $40,000 in fuel savings could be achieved with about 0.4 olives saved per passenger.
I have no idea if this actually happened, but the numbers look about right!
I'll use yours: 1 gallon for 100 pounds of weight.
If an olive is 6 grams (0.013 pounds), then 100 pounds need: 7,692 olives.
For $1.7/gallon, this gives: .00022 dollars fuel cost per olive (or 77 times less than your estimation).
For 500 million passengers with one olive less, we got: 500 million less olives x 0.00022 = $110,000 in savings.
Taken from another angle, 300 passengers * 0.00022 savings per olive/passenger is: 0.066 savings per flight.
From the 6000 flights/day they have on their site, this gives: 6000 * 365 * 0.066, or a saving of $144,540, so same ballpark.
They seem to save at least $80-$100,000 per year in both fuel and olive costs by removing just one olive.
Of course while it sounds amazing to us, it involves 6000*365 flights / 500 million passengers a year.
Which means that this seemingly "large" number (when compared to say, our salary) is actually peanuts compared to their operating costs. Like, by removing one olive per passenger, they reduce their operating costs per flight by less than .000025%.
Your estimate and mine are almost the same. 0.017 cents is $0.00017 is close to $0.00022. The difference is because I did some heavy intermediate rounding, what with olive weight being highly approximate to begin with.
You're right that in relative terms, the savings is tiny. But absolute numbers count as well. If it saves $40,000/year then that means one full-time employee can spend something like 25-50% of his time working on this problem and they still come out ahead.
