The European aircraft manufacturer Airbus has to install new software on thousands of aircraft in its A320 family. Airbus said yesterday that an incident involving an A320 family aircraft showed that intense sunlight could damage data that is important for control.
“Airbus recognizes that these recommendations will result in service disruptions for passengers and customers,” the company said. According to industry sources, around 6,000 aircraft are affected, more than half of the global fleet.
Long outages feared for some machines
Airbus explained that the repairs would have to be carried out before the next flight. According to insiders, the recall will only lead to a relatively short shutdown for around two thirds of the affected aircraft, as the airlines could use an earlier software version. However, with several hundred jets, the hardware may also have to be replaced, which could lead to weeks of downtime. Overall, the operation will cause significant disruption just before the busiest travel weekend of the year in the United States.
According to insiders, the incident that triggered the recall occurred on October 30 on a Jetblue flight from Cancun in Mexico to Newark in the US state of New Jersey. The flight had to make an emergency landing in Tampa, Florida, after a problem with the flight controls and a sudden, uncontrolled loss of altitude. Several people were taken to hospital.