Kind of weird, there historically have been similar 'do it the old school way because its more reliable' fallbacks for other things in air transport. What happened to the planes that were mid flight when this bug occurred?
Obviously though this is a pretty big technical error on the part of Jeppeson (the app provider). It's pretty clear that it shouldn't be possible for the apps to stop working due to something done remotely. There is another provider, called ForeFlight, which I think does a better job, and I was glad to see they weren't involved.
The device not working could have become an issue if something unexpected happened though.
When it's mediated by a computer, you tend to trust it as a magic box of truth- and injecting subtle errors is going to be easier with ADS-B than on a voice channel, isn't it?
There is a place for shiny tech, but the flight deck is not it. Paper worked, and we should go back to it.
It's wasteful to force the pilots to carry around 30lbs of paper which is out of date every few months, and which is not safety critical.
In total? That's nothing.
It'd be foolish for them to not save money when they can.
The article says pilots experienced "frequent injuries... from carrying heavy flight bags".
> An Electronic Flight Bag, which replaces more than 35 pounds of paper-based reference material and manuals that pilots often carried in their carry-on kitbag, offers numerous benefits for American and its pilots.
> ... removing the kitbag from all of our planes saves a minimum of 400,000 gallons and $1.2 million of fuel annually based on current fuel prices. Additionally, each of the more than 8,000 iPads we have deployed to date replaces more than 3,000 pages of paper previously carried by every active pilot and instructor. Altogether, 24 million pages of paper documents have been eliminated
> ... All American pilots now enjoy the benefits associated with replacing their heavy kitbags – one of the airline's biggest sources of pilot injuries – with a 1.35-pound iPad. The digital format also requires less time to update each of the six or more paper manuals found in each pilot's kitbag, as manual paper revisions take hours to complete every month, compared to the minutes it takes for electronic updates.