Airbus has issued an emergency update for 6,000 planes to protect them from rapid, uncontrolled drops in altitude.
The company announced on Friday that a software flaw in the Airbus A320 family of aircraft could hinder pilots’ ability to steer and stabilize during solar storms. They urged all airlines using the A320 passenger jet to update their software and hardware to protect against radiation interference.
The A320 family of passenger aircraft is the best-selling airliner yet built, and at any given time, roughly 3,000 A320 jets are thought to be airborne.
“Airbus has worked proactively with the aviation authorities to request immediate precautionary action from operators via an Alert Operators Transmission (AOT) in order to implement the available software and/or hardware protection, and ensure the fleet is safe to fly,” reads a statement from the company.
The flaw was discovered after an FAA investigation into an October flight emergency that left 15 people injured.
In October, a JetBlue flight from Cancun, Mexico, to Newark, New Jersey, suffered a terrifying, precipitous drop in altitude that forced the plane to make an emergency landing in Florida.
The FAA found that intense solar radiation had affected the plane’s computers, causing it to plunge from 35,000 feet to 10,000 feet. An air traffic control audio from the incident finds the pilot calling for medical equipment, saying, “We need medical equipment; we have at least three people injured, maybe a laceration in the head.”
It is unclear how many flights will be affected by the safety issue. Industry sources told CNBC that two-thirds of the affected planes will have a “relatively brief” grounding as they revert to an older software version.
American Airlines told Reuters it anticipated that 320 of its 480 A320 jets would need to receive the software update, which would take about two hours per plane. They expected the process to be complete by Saturday. However, industry sources said that for the estimated 1,000 planes needing a hardware update, the wait time could be much longer.
The recall, one of the largest in Airbus’ history, threatens to add even more chaos to one of the busiest travel weekends of the year.
The airline industry is already facing difficulty after air traffic controllers resigned in droves due to the stress caused by the government shutdown.
