Quote Originally Posted by Sir Moody View Post
Not to call you a luddite but...

This kind of thing has been going on for a while and is a MASSIVE cost saving - the kind of paper backup's companies used to rely on is a) expensive and b) Labour intensive (and in the case of Airplanes where extra weight costs more fuel also HEAVY)

The real issue here is one of Software testing, speaking as an insider who has been migrating the company I work for into the cloud (Microsofts in our case), the cloud has led Software engineers to push updates out far quicker but with less testing simply because their customers are always connected and thus will all update at once - in this case the glitch was with a piece of software provided by boeing, I would hazard a guess that they had just pushed an update out which has "issues".
You completely missed the point.

The flight plans should be on the plane's own internal computer, which should be receiving encrypted data from American Airlines' own servers this would, among other things, prevent the update issue you mentioned. The Cloud is all well and good if you're sending people weather reports or news but Civilian Airlines should have the same sort of fully internal systems as the military does, you shouldn't be using a third party like Apple to actually run the system.