Airlines around the world reported short-term disruptions heading into the weekend as they fixed software on a widely used commercial aircraft, after an analysis found the computer code may have contributed to a sudden drop in the altitude of a JetBlue plane last month.
On Nov. 28, 2025, Airbus advised airlines of a risk in the computers aboard the Airbus A320 Family triggered by recent solar storms.
The company directed about half of the 12,321 A319, A320, and A321 variants scheduled to fly on Saturday not to fly until the problem had been addressed.
More than 500 U.S.-registered aircraft will be impacted.
The problem is addressed for most by rolling back the most recent software update to the elevator-aileron computersa process that requires a few hours to complete and verify.
What’s an aileron?
Elevators and ailerons are movable surfaces on an aircraft that control its attitude in flight. The elevator, located on the horizontal stabilizer at the rear of the fuselage, allows the pilot to pitch the nose up to climb or down to descend.
Ailerons are hinged surfaces near the wingtips that move in opposite directions: when one goes up, the other goes down. This changes the lift on each wing, causing the aircraft to roll and enabling smooth banking turns.
Flaps also alter the shape of the wing, but they are positioned closer to the fuselage and move together. Flaps are primarily used during takeoff and landing to increase lift at slower speeds, helping the aircraft stay airborne safely at lower velocities.
Pilots control these surfaces from the flight deck. On Airbus fly-by-wire aircraft, the captain uses a sidestick on the left and the first officer uses one on the right. Instead of moving the surfaces mechanically, the sidestick inputs are sent to onboard computers, which interpret the commands and adjust the control surfaces automatically.
How space weather affects fly-by-wire aircraft
On Oct. 30, JetBlue Flight 1230 from Cancún to Newark experienced a sudden drop in altitude, injuring 15 passengers. An Airbus investigation determined that intense solar radiation may have corrupted data critical to the operation of the aircraft’s flight controls.
At the time, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center had issued a G1 geomagnetic storm warning. NASA and NOAA space-weather missions also recorded high 2 MeV integral flux levels, indicating an increase in high-energy electrons bombarding Earth and the spacecraft orbiting it.
High-energy particles released by the Sun during solar flares or coronal mass ejections can also interfere with the electronics in modern fly-by-wire aircraft, potentially causing transient errors in the computers that control critical flight surfaces.
These particles cause pulses in sensors, or even disrupt data in what electrical engineers call Single-Event Upsets and computer scientist call bit flipwhere is when a digital 1 can change to 0, or vice-versa.
These harsh radiation conditions are far more common in space, which is why missions such as the Solar Dynamics Observatory, the STEREO spacecraft, and the recent Mars rovers rely on specially protected computer chips. One widely used example is the RAD750.
This added protection is so important that recent missions, including the James Webb Space Telescope, continue to operate on RAD750 processors — a radiation-hardened version of the same basic processor design that once powered Apple MacBooks in the 1990s and the Nintendo Wii in the early 2000s.
Unlike spacecraft, which are continuously bathed in radiation, computers on commercial aircraft don’t need as much protection. They instead rely on redundant computers and layers of software to detect and handle errors.
