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Comment by Permit | Hacker News Reader

My first thought was that it's ridiculous to assume pilots would ever be reliant on Apple Maps when trying to land their aircraft.

Then I remembered a few similar occurrences:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianoce...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDgC4FMftpg

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Queensland-Floods-Helicopter-...

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If you are out of other options, you use whatever you have to keep yourself alive.

There's a big difference between using consumer maps for rescue operations when no other charts are available, and flying in the UK where there are high-quality VFR and IFR paper charts (which all pilots are expected to have for any areas they're flying through, either for primary navigation or just in case the GPS dies), certified cockpit GPS data, as well as radar services available to help you find a suitable airport.

Could happen in an emergency, and that is the point.

I'm not going to say that nobody would ever do it, but I will say that any pilot who relies on a smartphone's built-in mapping app to find airports deserves the outcome he gets.

It's a hazard to others.

What if the pilot has a feature phone with no maps at all??? Think of the children!

Quite a few airlines have handed out iPads to pilots already. It wouldn't be a stretch for that to happen eventually...

The pilots are not using the built-in Maps app.

Pilot here. I will confirm this, and also add that there are many other ways to find an airport (paper maps, atc, handheld aviation gps, built-in gps, airport beacons at night, and also just looking out the window). In an emergency, the last thing I'd do is have my head down in an ipad/iphone. From the aerial shot it appears clear that it's not an airport, but it is probably the largest field around, so it would be a target in an engine failure scenario regardless.

Everyone is laughing now, but the Keyhole satellite imaging application is used by military planners. The consumer version is known as Google Earth, since Keyhole inc. was acquired by Google. The resolution and geo-references might not be as good as the Keyhole Military version, but it isn't "dangerously" bad either.

A pilot could quite reasonably use geographic way-points for a respectable approach and landing.

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