Which when you track them down were based on passenger's TWEETS. . . not the statements of anyone in the flight crews. Screen going black does NOT mean the iPad crashed. It means the App crashed. Press the home button and they'd be back at the home screen. The passengers would NOT have been informed of anything such as "It looks like a problem with all the iPads on 737s" Nor would such a problem be limited to 737s, every pilot with American Airlines carries the same software.
Some of these statements make no sense. "24 minutes later" How long do you normally wait to take off? Flight checking and loading the iPad is instantaneous, at most a few seconds. "getting ready to take off" . . . these planes had not yet taken off and were awaiting take off when they had to returned to the terminal.
"The glitch caused iPad software - used by the planes' pilots and co-pilots for viewing flight plans - to stop working. . ."Parse those sentences, and you will see that in both cases it was the"software" and the "app" that specifically shut down." This is cited from an authoritative source, NOT some anonymous Tweet, citing something he remembers having heard over an airline PA system. SHEESH. You've been building your case on twitter comments from non-authority hear-say.""The app could not reconcile the duplicate, causing it to shut down."
The airline reported that no flights were cancelled and only a few were delayed as pilots downloaded new versions of the software.
""We were able to remedy the situation quickly, and instruct pilots to uninstall and reinstall the app."
There you have the facts, from the horse's mouth.
You, of course would rather believe rumor, and innuendo. But the airlines are held to a higher standard and will have to also report to those very FAA regulators on why their flights were delayed, and TWEETS are not evidence.
No you posted a press release from a corporate entity.
The "horses mouth" would be the pilots involved.
Now either the pilots made an announcement on those flights that the units shutdown or they didn't BUT several sources claim that is what was announced over the intercom of the flight.
I'll believe pilots before I believe a Corporate spokesman. Bottom line it was bad enough flights were grounded until there was a fix. If they weren't grounded then they would have flown without the fix.
Which points to a system that can be shutdown with a single update glitch.
Single Point failure.
The fix is easy hard copy available quickly in case it happens again, or they change the rules that you can go ahead and fly with a glitchy app/unit. If no easily obtainable backup is made available for each flight or the rules aren't changed then it can happen again and it can be much bigger. AND the same goes for airlines using other units besides Apple. The nature of the gizmos sets up a single point failure in the system because ALL the units using the APP or ALL the units using the software can glitch when they are updated and they are updated via the internet/wifi. So it can happen very fast unlike the days when you manually updated software by actually inserting a CD/DVD or a floppy disc.