October 19th, 2011
In the interest of safety we would like to raise awareness of an issue in iOS 5 which could affect pilots using the iPad as a navigation aid.
Our synthetic vision system which is integrated into WingX Pro 7 fully supports iOS 5. However, iOS 5 introduces a new ‘clean-up’ feature which can delete the terrain and obstacle data if your device starts running low on memory.
According to Dr. Hilton Goldstein:
“…you could get to the airport and find that WingX Pro7 and/or its databases (e.g. sectionals) have just disappeared,” As a result, Dr. Goldstein is recommending that WingX Pro7 users delay upgrading to iOS 5 “until Apple stops deleting your apps and data.” You can read more about this particular issue with iOS 5 on AeroNew here. You can also read about it on Hilton’s web site here.
This problem is not specific to WingX Pro 7 but other applications that download and cache data locally on the iPad and iPhone, including ForeFlight. The ForeFlight blog has a post about the issue here and it advises you to pre-flight your iPad and iPhone before flying. That is sound advice.