The low-cost carrier has announced a partnership with Vodafone Ireland, which will see the mobile operator providing "local and wide area network access, telephony, fixed line mobile 3G and 4G functionality" for the airline at every point on its route map throughout Europe and North Africa.

Vodafone's support will extend to communications and IT infrastructure across the airline's "ticketing, check-in, ground crew, inflight crew and pilot systems", so Ryanair will clearly be depending heavily on the mobile operator to maintain the continuity of its fleetwide operations.

That would sound great, but as part of the deal its pilots are also getting Apple iPads as part of its paperless cockpits programme.

Now, I don't know about you but I would really not like to place my life in the hands of a person who depending on a bendy iPad if something goes wrong.

It is bad enough that when you land the outfit blasts you with a horseracing bugle to remind you that it actually arrived when it said it would, but knowing that your safety depends on anything that comes out of Cupertino scares the crap out of me.

Pilots are required to carry extensive documentation onboard, including flight data and aircraft technical materials. In their paper form, these documents can weigh around 15kg or more, but they can be easily condensed into the much lighter and more convenient form factor of a tablet.

Of course it can run out of battery, catch fire, or bend, but hell the pilot does not need to carry paper and that is the most important thing.

When American Airlines adopted iPads for its own paperless cockpit rollout, it projected that simply by stripping out the weight of all that paper from every flight in its schedules, it would save $1.2 million a year in fuel costs.

The Tame Apple Press did not say how much they had to spend continuously upgrading their expensive iPads every year. I do not fly on American Airlines either.