The change must be made before the next regular flight, and is one of the largest mass recalls to affect Airbus.
The separate software move announced on Friday must be made before the next regular flight takes off, threatening cancellations or delays during one of the busiest travel weekends of the year in the United States and beyond, according to a separate bulletin from airlines seen by Reuters news agency.
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Airbus said in a statement that a recent incident involving A320-family aircraft showed that intense solar radiation can corrupt data critical to the functioning of flight controls.
“Airbus acknowledges that these recommendations will cause operational disruptions to passengers and customers,” it said.
The incident that triggered the unexpected repair action involved a JetBlue flight from Cancún, Mexico, to Newark, New Jersey, on Oct. 30, in which several passengers were injured due to a sharp drop in altitude, industry sources said.
Flight 1230 was forced to make an emergency landing in Tampa, Florida after a flight control problem and a sudden uncontrolled drop in altitude, prompting an FAA investigation.
JetBlue and the FAA had no immediate comment.
Airbus said the European Union Aviation Safety Agency is about to issue an emergency directive to fix it.
two hour repair
Industry sources said that for about two-thirds of the affected jets, the recall will result in a relatively brief grounding as airlines revert to the previous software version.
Still, it comes at a time of intense demand on airline repair shops, already plagued by the grounding of hundreds of Airbus jets due to lack of maintenance capacity and long wait times for individual engine repairs or inspections.
Hundreds of affected jets may also require hardware replacement, threatening longer wait times, sources said.
Nearly 3,000 A320-family jets were in the air worldwide shortly after Airbus’ announcement.
American Airlines and Hungary’s Wizz Air said they have already identified which of their planes will need a software fix. United Airlines said it was not affected.
American said in a statement that about 340 of its 480 A320 planes require software replacement, and it expects most of those fixes to be completed “today and tomorrow,” requiring about two hours for each plane.
biggest collective memory
There are approximately 11,300 A320-family aircraft in operation, including 6,440 aircraft of the core A320 model, which first flew in 1987.
The setback appears to be the largest-scale recall in Airbus’s 55-year history and comes just weeks after the A320 overtook the Boeing 737 as the most-delivered model.
The A320 was the first mainstream aircraft to feature fly-by-wire computer controls.
The bulletin seen by Reuters traced the problem to a flight system called ELAC (elevator and aileron computer), which sends commands from the pilot’s side-stick to the rear elevators. These, in turn, control the pitch or nose angle of the aircraft.
The computer’s manufacturer, Thales of France, said in response to a Reuters query that the computer complied with Airbus specifications and that the functionality in question was supported by software that is not under Thales’ responsibility.
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