| I was showing my Glass to a family member who visited from out of state. He's a commercial helicopter pilot, isn't wired in to the tech space, and didn't know much of anything about it. He went completely mental after putting it on. A few interesting things he noted: 1. Many commercial helicopter pilots today use iPads with a software called Foreflight (http://foreflight.com/). They mount the iPad in the cabin and prefer it to the older analog stuff. 2. The form factor alone is a huge improvement over anything else available on the market, he told me. He also said that many pilots would pay top dollar for a device like Glass. "All" it would need to do is: a) display a hud w/ waypoints, b) show current conditions, c) know which direction he's looking at. 4. Pilots see the world differently. We look at Google Maps, they look at SkyVector[2]. Flying commercially is mostly an automated affair with everything planned out ahead of time. Computers do all the work. The location/size/properties of every airport is stored in a consistent format. Pretty much everything is standardized and easily accessible, no matter how remote the location! [3] 5. He told me that the day-to-day processes are ancient. Logbooks are kept by hand, for example. This is interesting considering aviation is a highly regulated industry. All process are laid out in great detail and slow to change. This could make building software in this space easier once you get past the initial hump. 6. Military pilots have had things like this for years, but way more advanced. He told me about helmet-mounted displays (woah) [1]. We went on to discuss the myriad of practical applications for a device like Glass, even if the cost stays high past the prototyping phase. Unfortunately none of them included every-day usage by his wife and kids. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmet-mounted_display [2]: http://skyvector.com/ [3]: http://skyvector.com/airport/ZMCD/Dornod-Choibalsan-Internat... |
It's a basic tenet of air safety that everything can be done by hand when equipment fails.
For example, it's a requirement that you should be able to do vector calculations to account for wind: using only pen-and-paper tools.
Although licensed pilots are allowed to use technology to assist, you shouldn't imagine that the ancient day-to-day processes will change.