Global airlines race to fix glitch in Airbus jets

TOKYO/NEW DELHI/PARIS — Global airlines scrambled to fix a software glitch on Airbus A320 jets on Saturday as a partial recall by the European plane maker halted hundreds of flights in Asia and Europe and threatened US travel over the busiest weekend of the year.

Airlines worked through the night after global regulators told them to remedy the problem before resuming flights.

Airlines that said they had completed or nearly finished all their software updates on Saturday included American Airlines, United Airlines, Air India, Hungary's Wizz Air and Air Arabia.

The overnight effort by airlines appeared to help head off the worst-case scenario and capped the number of flight delays in Asia and Europe.

In the United States, which will face high demand after the Thanksgiving holiday period, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that impacted US carriers "have reported great progress, and are on track to meet the deadline of this Sunday at midnight to complete the work" despite Jet-Blue saying it canceled dozens of flights that had been scheduled for Sunday.

Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury apologized to airlines and passengers after the surprise recall of 6,000 planes, or more than half of the global A320-family fleet, which recently overtook the Boeing 737 as the industry's most-delivered model.

"I want to sincerely apologize to our airline customers and passengers who are impacted now," Faury posted on LinkedIn.

Airbus instructed its clients on Friday to take "immediate precautionary action" after a technical malfunction on board a JetBlue flight in October exposed that intense solar radiation could corrupt data critical to the flight controls.

On Oct 30, a JetBlue-operated A320 aircraft encountered an in-flight control issue due to a computer malfunction.

The plane suddenly nosedived as it traveled between Cancun in Mexico and Newark in the United States, and pilots had to land in Tampa, Florida.

US media quoted local firefighters saying that some passengers were injured.

Globally, there are about 11,300 of the single-aisle jets in service, including 6,440 of the core A320 model. Those include some of the largest and busiest low-cost carriers.

Tracker data from Cirium and FlightAware showed most global airports operating with good-to-moderate levels of delays.

Wide impact

AirAsia, one of the world's largest A320 customers, said it aimed to complete fixes in 48 hours.

India's airlines IndiGo and Air India have almost completed software upgrades by Sunday.

Japan's ANA Holdings canceled 95 flights on Saturday, affecting 13,500 travelers.

By Saturday, Airbus was telling airlines that repairs to some of the A320 jets affected may be less burdensome than first thought, industry sources said, with fewer than the original estimate of 1,000 needing the time-consuming hardware changes.

There were also unresolved questions about the impact of solar flare radiation blamed for the JetBlue incident, which is being treated by French investigators as an "incident", the lowest of three categories of potential safety emergency.

"Any operational challenges that come at short notice and affecting a large part of your operation are tough to deal with," said UK-based aviation consultant John Strickland.

Agencies Via Xinhua