iPad App failure grounds American Airlines – Really!

I read this and my first reaction (probably a bit like yours) was…Huh?

An iPad App grounds an Airline? What’s a mobile App doing as part of an airlines critical business systems?

Dig further and it gets interesting. It makes sound business sense for AA (and others) to use mobile technology. Here its a $1.2m in savings a year – through weight reduction. I did notice on recent travels that you rarely see aircrews lugging those huge pilot cases any more – and this is why. Its all gone into Apps; light, flexible easy to use. It shows just how central mobile app technology is. Some smart people say that we are just at the start of this revolution, and errors like this show the technology has a way to go to fully mature. What it makes clear is the big business impact that a simple App crash can have even on even the most trad of businesses.

(OK, so maybe impact and crash aren’t the best words to use here) – But you get my drift.

What happened and why shouldn’t it have happened

OK, so hindsight is great,  isn’t it? Makes us all feel really smart. But it has to be said that you’d really think airline IT boffin somewhere would have thought this through and done a risk assessment.

So it appears that the App (called FliteDeck – made by Boeing business Jeppesen) crashed when it tried to access charts stored in a back-end database. Somehow the DB had duplicate files that the App couldnt resolve so errored and crashed. The App was used to manage the fight plan, no flight plan = no flight.  The only way to fix it was to connect to Wi-Fi and reinstall the app. I’m guessing it’s probably not that easy at 35,000 ft.

This did make us Kumulites scratch our heads and think though. It shows again how important back-end infrastructure is when Apps are critical business tools. If they had been using a mobile back-end as a service like our mBaaS and running kScripts to check for file duplication in the database, then this just wouldn’t have happened. Even better would be to ensure they are using hook-ups to pull data from other (reliable, tested and trusted) sources rather than replicating sources, because that’s how mistakes get made, isn’t it.

There’s a lot of chat in Kumulos HQ about this. The conclusion is what happened here was a good thing (because no one got hurt) and may jolt techs to realise that a 4 tier architecture with a mBaaS (with kScripts and hookups)  as a consolidation layer is the way to go.

Enterprise mobility and utility Apps are here and here to stay but right now the DIY back-ends still feels a bit flabby – firm back-ends run by those who know their stuff is the future.

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