Is Anybody Going to Look into This?

The recent spate of iPhone ads seem to be part of an effective campaign--real people talking about how useful their iPhones are. It's an old strategy, certainly, but it gets pulled out again because it works. But there's one ad that seems just a bit questionable. An airplane pilot explains how he uses his iPhone effectively overrule the control tower. He's on the ground at O'Hare waiting for clearance to take off, but because of some rain in the forecast, the plane is put on a three-hour delay. I'm not sure whether the passengers stuck on the ground were allowed to restart their wireless devices, but the pilot wasted no time in firing up his iPhone. He went to weather.com, where he found a more up-to-date forecast. The showers had apparently already passed, so there was no need to keep delaying the flight. He radioed back to the control tower to point this out to them, and within half an hour, his flight had been cleared to take off. Great news all around.

This incident raises a number of questions, of course. The big one, obviously, is what kind of state is our air traffic control system in that it can be so easily trumped by a pilot with an iPhone? Where does the O'Hare control tower get its weather information that's so blatantly inferior to what any of us can get right this minute at weather.com? Would we be better off if we just piped the Internet into the control tower and let the controllers use whatever Websites were most helpful? Or maybe we should just dispense with all the clearly outmoded equipment in the control tower and give each controller an iPhone. We already know that the air traffic control system uses AT&T, so why not just go the extra mile to the iPhone? It might make morale go up a bit if in between tracking flights, the controllers could check out the latest video on YouTube.

(Hat tip to Jason for pointing this ad out to me.)