[_broody]

Yes, the app crashed. That was no doubt an app bug. The iPads also crashed. That's eyebrow-raising, and definitely an iPad glitch.

The airline will fix the bug and it won't happen again. But relying on a closed, unauditable platform to keep any sort of safety-critical data in these conditions seems absolutely unconvincing to me.

[skywhopper]

These enterprise apps aren't vetted by Apple, so they could very well be using unsafe APIs Apple doesn't recommend and would block during an App Store review process. And there are tons of ways to crash machines from userspace. Also, it's likely the iPads are running an old version of iOS. And for all we know, the iPads are jailbroken and all bets are off. Finally, it sounds like AA's software provider was able to deliver a patch, so I don't think it's just a matter of iOS being "unauditable". What OS would they be using that met your auditability standards? Even Android is not totally open.

[CHY872]

It's not safety-critical data; that absolutely wouldn't be allowed. If something were to go wrong in flight, the air traffic control would have no problem getting the plane down with no problems.

Furthermore, you have 2 iPads in the cockpit, so it could only be a problem if both fail at the same time. This seems like it'd be a more rare occurrence in the safety case.

In terms of whether open source could have helped, I doubt it very much. Stopping a bug like this (beyond extensive in-house testing) is to largely declare the platform and software bug-free (individual audits typically focus on properties like security, which are easy to target), and a full operating system (including UI) is far too large to effectively audit in that way. Certainly iOS gets far more user milage than any free alternative, which is a big advantage there.

I'd have far more faith in Apple's display system than I would the eminently auditable Gnome (this is all assuming that the FAA did not have access to the iOS source, which is unknown at this time).

[ifewalter32]

I'm interested in a better solution/idea if you have any.

[arfar]

Picking an open source platform you can audit, like Linux (Android) for example.