If you look at the different flight management systems in commercial aircraft, from companies like Rockwell-Collins, Boeing, etc., all these systems are designed by organizations with a long history and specific expertise in avionics software development. Apple could not even begin to contemplate the infrastructure, culture, or scope of building a small element of these kinds of mission critical systems.
Tens of thousands of hours of design, development, and testing go into these critical systems that are built to a standard way above consumer grade solutions based on operating systems like Windows, MacOS, and in this case
IOS.
Yes, I acknowledge the Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) American Airlines is using on the iPad is not necessarily mission critical, but apparently the iPad based EFB is critical enough to prevent take-off, and as others have pointed out here, what if this problem occurred during flight (yea yea yea I know there are backup procedures for a failed EFB, the plane is not going to crash if the iPad EFB breaks). I also acknowledge the FAA approved American Airlines' use of an iPad based EFB, but as I said in an earlier post, the FAA appears to also drink some of the Apple cool aide.
My point is thus, using consumer grade systems based on something like IOS, is absolutely moronic. The FAA should not be approving flight related systems, be it an EFB or other flight management system, based on consumer grade operating systems and/or hardware. They should never allow this kind of consumer technology to work its way into commercial cockpits, period! Whats next, a complete commercial flight management system based on an iMac?
If you want to understand some of the other components of a commercial flight system, here are two links. Keep in mind, when you fly, your life is tied to these different systems to some degree or another
so do you really want cutesy little Apple (and IOS) in the cockpit? Do you want your pilot and/or co-pilot being distracted in-flight while they screw around rebooting or whatever with their iPads? Bottom line, consumer grade systems do not belong in the cockpit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdiGzrb5Pmw&feature=youtu.be
http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/articles/2012_q1/3/