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Comment by nachteilig | Hacker News Reader

I can't speak to Ireland, but pilots using the Maps app for navigation wouldn't "fly" in the US. There are electronic cockpit apps that can be used on an iPad, but Maps isn't one of them.

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I don't think that's what the Justice Minister means. It's conceivable that in an emergency, as a last resort, the pilot of a small plane may use the Maps app on an iPad or iPhone so scout potential landing areas. Obviously it's unlikely to happen but it is a possibility (probably not on a 747 though).

I would love to hear a sequence of events that could possibly involve a pilot attempting to land on the basis of information from an iPhone map.

There's whole emergency systems in place to ensure things like this don't happen- you know, basic radio contact with the ground being one obvious example.

Irish Government ministers should be dealing with our sovereign debt crisis rather than spouting crap about stuff they've no idea about.

There is already a post on this thread about similar events already having occurred - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4550431

Didn't see any reliance on a maps app for emergency navigation. In the one example the pilots printed out an image from Google Earth as a guide to the terrain of the landing area, they still used their eyes and brains to decide how to land once they got there. In the other they used the app to locate street addresses, but that wasn't critical navigation and the same could've been achieved with a standard street map.

I have yet to hear of any pilot relying on a maps app like Google Maps in an emergency.

If you can see the field, you can tell it's not an airport (although you'd know much sooner if you had your charts or cockpit GPS out), and decide if you want to land there anyway.

If you can't see the field, your iPhone GPS isn't going to be nearly precise enough to let you land safely anyway, even if it was an airport.

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