Ahead of Holiday Travel Season, Airbus Initiates Recall of A320 Family of Jets
Recall was initiated after it was determined that intense solar activity could not only produce beautiful auroras, but could also corrupt flight‑control data.
Airbus has issued an urgent global alert about a software vulnerability in the A320‑family of jets, just ahead of the holiday travel season.
Europe’s Airbus (AIR.PA), opens new tab said on Friday it was ordering immediate repairs to 6,000 of its widely-used A320 family of jets in a sweeping recall affecting more than half the global fleet, threatening upheaval during the busiest travel weekend of the year in the United States.
The setback appears to be among the largest recalls affecting Airbus in its 55-year history and comes weeks after the A320 overtook the Boeing 737 as the most-delivered model. At the time Airbus issued its directive, some 3,000 A320-family jets were in the air.
The fix mainly involves reverting to earlier software, but it must be carried out before the planes can fly again, according to a bulletin to airlines seen by Reuters. Numerous airlines on Friday said the repairs could potentially cause flight delays or cancellations.
The world’s largest A320 operator, American Airlines (AAL.O), opens new tab, said some 340 of its 480 A320 aircraft would need the fix. It said it mostly expected these to be completed by Saturday with about two hours required for each plane.
Europe’s Airbus said it was ordering an immediate software change on a ‘significant number’ of its best-selling A320 family of jets — a move that industry sources said would bring disruption to thousands of jets https://t.co/PqGHSaTpMM
— Reuters (@Reuters) November 28, 2025
This recall was initiated after it was determined that intense solar activity could corrupt flight‑control data and potentially lead to spontaneous aircraft movements or loss of control.
Airbus found intense solar storms, like solar flares, could cause pilots to lose control of the Airbus A320 series of planes, including A319, A320, and A321s. About 6,000 of the single-aisle planes, which are the bestselling passenger aircraft in the world, need the repairs.
“Analysis of a recent event involving an A320 Family aircraft has revealed that intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical to the functioning of flight controls,” Airbus said in a statement.
On October 30, JetBlue Flight 1230 – an A320 – was flying from Cancun, Mexico, to Newark, New Jersey when it suddenly dove down in altitude. The pilots made an emergency landing in Tampa, Florida, where about 15 people were taken to the hospital.
Airbus investigated the incident and on Friday told airlines in an “Alert Operators Transmission” that the fix was needed. The company believes it is the only time this specific problem has happened, but says it “proactively worked with aviation authorities… keeping safety as our number one and overriding priority.”
Airbus is investigating an A320 Family issue linked to intense solar radiation that can corrupt flight control data.
A precautionary AOT has gone out to operators and an emergency directive from EASA is on the way.
Expect some schedule disruptions. Safety stays first.#Airbus… pic.twitter.com/Y9UhX4ZX3e— Aviation A2z (@Aviationa2z) November 28, 2025
This discovery was made in the wake of a solar storm on Oct. 29, which resulted in spectacular auroras that could be seen in both northern and southern latitudes that usually aren’t treated to these displays.
Get ready, aurora chasers! The northern lights could continue to dazzle tonight (Oct. 29), as a stream of fast solar wind from a large Earth-facing coronal hole continued to buffet Earth’s magnetic field, driving unsettled to active conditions.
Forecasters at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) predict possible minor (G1) geomagnetic storm conditions for Oct. 29 through Oct. 30, with a chance of stronger moderate (G2) storming if conditions intensify. The U.K. Met Office echoes this forecast, predicting that the northern lights could dip into latitudes around Scotland or the northern U.S., depending on the timing and strength of the incoming solar wind.
A combination of fast solar wind from a large Earth-facing coronal hole and possible influence from a weak coronal mass ejection (CME) that arrived on Oct. 27, could cause solar wind speeds to climb significantly, potentially reaching 500-600 km/s, from Oct. 29 through Oct. 30 — great news for aurora chasers.
More recently, solar storms paired with a Coronal Mass Injection (CME) resulted in disruptions in radio communications and more social media sharing of aurora images.
The most immediate and significant effect of the event was a major disruption of radio communication in the regions facing the Sun. Following the solar flare, a severe radio blackout was recorded across Europe, Africa, and Asia, lasting approximately 30 minutes to one hour.
A Ground Level Enhancement (GLE) was also observed, a rare phenomenon that occurs only once or twice per year. These events happen when solar particles are energetic enough to penetrate Earth’s magnetic shield, which normally protects us from less intense solar outbursts. High energy solar particles can harm astronauts, damage spacecraft and can produce a cascade of secondary particles in our atmosphere that could cause errors in electronic components if they reach the ground. This was only the 77th GLE since records began in the 1940s.
Image by perplexity.ai.
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Comments
Not a “recall;” the lanes are not grounded. Airbus is initiating a software fix which is in progress.
One tech, one thumb drive, two hours. Done.
Tin foil is my guess
A thumb drive he found in the parking lot of Aldi. He couldn’t believe his good fortune!
(Don’t laugh. It has happened.)
For airplane software upgrades? I wasn’t being sarcastic in my post. It’s exactly what they’re doing. It’s a two hour software change.
“The planes are not grounded”
I’d assume from the universally uninformative description that it’s a fix for what happens when the computers don’t agree in this or that case. Usually hard cases revert to more pilot control and less automatic safety checks, turning it into more and more of an actual airplane. Probably a mistake in this or that software decision.
A preview of Your Life on AI…
Assuming Hal doesn’t turn us into batteries or destroy most of us ‘for our own good’ and put the remainder into people zoos or whatever other dystopian sci-fi warning is being ignored about ‘thinking machines’.
Like modern jets, the A320 family runs double redundant hardware for flight control. Three different types of CPUs run the same program, and a 2/3 vote is required for any action. This is sharply less vulnerable to cosmic ray bursts than one computer, or one type of computer, running the same logic. Cosmic rays cause software corruption in-flight, and the plane cannot decide to crash because of a glitch.
In this case the problems were with software testing management, and with software development. Like in the US warship that went dead due to a Windows crash, and the Toyotas that would refuse to disable cruise control, there was a nominally-impossible case that had no code to deal with the software fault. The next level of software or hardware detected an un-handled condition and halted — rather than continue doing the wrong thing. Halting is a perfectly natural thing for software engineers, but might not be the right decision at 35,000 feet.
Testing is supposed to capture this sort of thing, and of course there are not supposed to be any un-handled exceptions in the main code. Two layers of error are in play after the scrambling of the data due to cosmic ray interactions with the hardware.
Loss of flight control is a good reason to roll back to a known good version of software. This is 100% a failure of Airbus processes. Does a passenger have a right to sue? Hard to say.
The two things hardware types test for are safety (the following cannot occur) and liveness (the state always comes back to this point eventually).
An explicit halt won’t be in the code as it points to itself as a problem right away (liveness). It will always take one path or another.
What amounts to a halt is a control law jump to more pilot control, with respect to that condition.
The cosmic ray case is very difficult because it literally re-writes the code (or data) after program execution has begun. For example, an invalid opcode or invalid address may
be introduced into the program while it is running. Of course a cosmic ray burst may create a valid, but unintended, opcode or address. In the case of invalid (or out-of-bounds) machine code, a halt and branch may happen, like some sort of interrupt handler. There never was a halt in the code when it started execution, but radiation burst added one. Hardware then executes the newly inserted code. This is a better case to deal with than a radiation burst writing new, valid (but wrong) code into the executing flight control system. How would the pilot know if such edits happened in-flight?
An overwrite of the code just produces a disagreement. What to do about the disagreement is likely where the coding mistake was. Particularly as the fix was reverting to older code, which is just as susceptible to whatever cosmic rays did.
So… a problem with software in a critical control system?
And they blamed
Cloudflaresolar flares?