[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).