Paris (AFP) – More airlines around the world announced delayed or cancelled flights Saturday following an Airbus alert that up to 6,000 A320 aircraft may require upgrades.
Airbus instructed its clients Friday to take “immediate precautionary action” after evaluating a technical malfunction on board a JetBlue flight in October.
“Intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical to the functioning of flight controls,” it said, adding that “a significant number of A320 Family aircraft currently in-service” may be affected.
Replacing the software will take “a few hours” on most planes but for some 1,000 aircraft, the process “will take weeks”, a source close to the issue told AFP.
Air France told AFP it was calculating how many more flights would be cancelled Saturday.
“Customers affected by cancellations are being notified individually by SMS and email,” a spokesperson said Friday.
It cancelled 35 flights on Friday, while Colombian airline Avianca said 70 percent of its fleet had been impacted by a technical issue in the European plane-maker’s software.
The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) said in a statement that Airbus had informed it about the issue.
“These measures may cause short-term disruption to flight schedules and therefore inconvenience to passengers,” EASA said, adding that “safety is paramount”.
Aerospace and defence giant Thales told AFP that it makes the flight control computer, which it said was “fully compliant with the technical specifications issued by Airbus” and certified by the EASA and its US equivalent, the FAA.
But it added: “The functionality in question is supported by software that is not under Thales’ responsibility.”
The Airbus statement did not specify which company had designed the software.
“Airbus acknowledges these recommendations will lead to operational disruptions to passengers and customers,” it said, apologising for the inconvenience.
On October 30, a JetBlue-operated A320 aircraft encountered an in-flight control issue due to a computer malfunction.
The plane suddenly nosedived as it travelled between Cancun in Mexico and Newark in the United States, and pilots had to land in Tampa, Florida.
US media quoted local firefighters saying that some passengers were injured.
Contacted by AFP, JetBlue did not comment on the incident but said it had already begun necessary changes on some A320 and A321 models.
Its competitor, American Airlines, said it had already begun updating software following Friday’s alert, and expected “the vast majority” of approximately 340 affected aircraft to be serviced by Saturday. “Several delays” would occur as a result, it added.
After initially saying it had not been affected, its competitor United Airlines said it had identified six affected aircraft and said it expected minor disruptions on a few flights.
Delta Air Lines said it expected to have made the necessary updates by Saturday morning.
Air India warned Saturday of delays, while an Avianca statement warned of “significant disruptions over the next 10 days”.
In the Philippines, local carriers Philippine Airlines and Cebu Pacific were offering refunds or rebooked tickets after grounding at least 40 domestic flights on Saturday.
Produced since 1988, the A320 is the world’s best-selling aeroplane. Airbus sold 12,257 of the aircraft by the end of September compared with the sale of 12,254 Boeing 737s.
No software update takes literal weeks. Do they mean itll be weeks before the technician gets access to the planes?
That’s exactly what they mean. The planes cant fly until the software ia reloaded onto them. For many, they are located at hubs and technicians can go through them overnight.
But some of the planes are not located at hubs with full maintenance crews. Those planes will need more time to get taken care of.
Are the planes actually grounded until the update goes in?
They are not safe to fly.
Would be weird if they weren’t.
You say that, but Boeing…
The article didn’t make it clear that it was a fleet-wide grounding, and it sounded like a rare event, solar flares are relatively rare, and usually predictable.
Probably best to play it safe though.
…
This is Airbus?
None of the articles specify… my guess is yes. Because of how serious the issue is, and relatively easy it is to fix. Its only the remote areas that will take longer, and that’s a small number of planes in the grand scheme.
You have to dig reasonably hard, but a few articles have linked to the original EASA directive, which is allowing up to three non-passenger flights to relocate the plane to a service location.
I’m not sure if that rule would just apply in Europe where they have authority.
Solar flares are predictable, with a decent lead time, so they could ground them during solar activity. But when the cost is potentially so high, an abundance of caution does make sense.
Would be good if the articles had linked to an official statement.
Yeah, they already did that like they always do, when the solar storm was at its peak weeks ago.
The normal mitigation for those events was not enough this time apparently. A plane was affected and had an in flight issue after the solar maximum was done and there shouldn’t be issues from it.
That’s why this is such a big deal. This hasn’t happened before on this scale. They’re making sure that every plane that might have been affected by storm damage has known good software loaded now. That’s why its not every A320, just the ones they’ve determined were potentially vulnerable. Most likely those actually flying around during the maximum time, with the Earth’s magnetic field 30k feet less thick above them.
It was a big solar storm last month, so makes sense. Thanks for the additional background though, I’ll do some more reading :)
At least this software grounded planes before take off. Boeing grounded planes in the air.
I’m not excited about flying in an aircraft whose flight control software was rush updated by the manufacturer after issues they say were caused by solar flares. Then you’ve got the vendor Thales saying things like, “[The hardware is] fully compliant with the technical specifications issued by Airbus” and that the software is not their problem. The blame game does not instill confidence.
Here’s the thing… Solar flares don’t compile bugs into software. They disrupt electric fields in hardware memory devices. Maybe you can create redundant data and checksum the crap out of it but if your hardware is susceptible to intense solar radiation maybe refactoring with a few extra memory checks shouldn’t be your response.
Admittedly, this is layman’s conjecture. But this layman is going to be 30,000ft over water in the next few days and I’d like to have a more definitive answer than, “Solar flares goofed us so we’re pushing updates.”
If this is HCL again, it will be so funny.
