iPhone 4 Saved Lives, Says Queensland Pilot

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Some of you will likely remember the terrible flooding that struck Queensland, Australia back in January. Well, one of the pilots involved in an operation that saved fully 22 lives isn’t giving the credit to courage or determination so much as he is giving it to Google Maps on an iPhone.

You may not think of a cell phone as a life-saving device (chances are you’ve probably never been stranded somewhere–believe me, when your car breaks down in the back end of nowhere you’ll be glad you had that little guy on hand), but for the helicopter pilot involved in one such life-saving effort, Mark Kempton, an iPhone definitely saved some lives.

Kempton gave a report to the Queensland Floods Commission, and explained himself in better detail. See, not surprisingly, that flood took out a whole lot of landmarks and replaced them with a big brown field that can best be described as nondescript. That pretty much took out any thought of using paper maps, and navigating by line of sight in a helicopter is tricky business at best. But one of Kempton’s crew was packing an iPhone, and when said crewman fired up Google Maps, suddenly their position was perfectly clear.

Kempton went on to recommend that helicopters be given better winches and bigger fuel tanks, but the centerpiece of his report said that the helicopter definitely needed improved navigation systems. Likely, he probably at least thought that they should be similar to the Google Maps system on his iPhone.

We’ve heard, previously, about the value of iPads in flight situations, providing much easier access to charts and maps and approach plates and taxi diagrams and assorted other aeronautical whatnot. But this may well be one of the first times we’ve heard about an iPhone serving as a flight navigation aid. Either way, though, I’m all in favor of saving lives, so pilots, you may want to keep an iPhone on hand, just in case.