I experienced all of this on a recent flight, much to my frustration. Once fully exasperated at having the podcasts id predownloaded not actually play, I turned to my audible app. This too spent the first minute of booting clearly trying to contact servers to call home with a locked up, unusable screen, despite me having a large local library for access.

App developers clearly rarely test their code in airplane mode these days, much to our annoyance!