Airlines reported short-term disruptions heading into the busy Thanksgiving holiday weekend as they fixed software on a widely used commercial aircraft.
Thousands of Airbus A320 airliners around the world might require a software update, potentially causing flight delays or cancellations during the busy Thanksgiving holiday weekend.
The emergency update stems from an incident Oct. 30 when a JetBlue flight traveling from Cancun, Mexico, to Newark, New Jersey, experienced an issue with its flight controls. The plane dropped about 100 feet in seven seconds, according to preliminary flight data from Flightradar24, and was diverted to Tampa, Florida.
Between 15 and 20 people were injured and taken to area hospitals upon landing, according to Vivian Shedd, a spokesperson for Tampa Fire Rescue.
Airbus identified an apparent issue relating to “intense solar radiation,” which “may corrupt data critical to the functioning of flight controls” and recommended an emergency software update to the A320 family of aircraft – a common passenger plane for U.S. carriers.
The Federal Aviation Administration and the European Union Aviation Safety Agency issued emergency orders Friday that grounded the affected planes. The EU safety agency’s order goes into effect Saturday at 7 p.m. EST. At that point planes awaiting the updates would be essentially grounded. The order allows for the planes to be flown up to three times without passengers to get them to a location for the fix.
The software change comes as U.S. passengers were beginning to head home from the Thanksgiving holiday, which is the busiest travel time in the country. More than 500 U.S.-registered aircraft will be impacted, the Associated Press reported.
Several U.S. carriers use the Airbus A320 family in their fleet. Spirit and Frontier only fly the A320 family of planes, with many popular carriers maintaining several hundred in their fleet. Delta flies about 315 A320 jets, United has about 200 planes and American has around 480 planes.
United told CBS News the order impacts six aircraft in its Airbus fleet. Delta expects only a small portion of its A320 fleet, less than 50 aircraft, to be impacted by the updates.
American Airlines said in a statement to CBS News Friday evening that it had downgraded the number of impacted aircraft from more than 340 to 209, and that it expected the majority of those 209 to be updated by Friday “and through the night.”
“All aircraft will be completed ahead of the EASA Emergency Airworthiness Directive taking effect tomorrow at 6 p.m. CT,” American said in a statement.
Hawaii Airlines said it was unaffected.
Internationally, Japan’s All Nippon Airways canceled 65 domestic flights on Saturday and said further cancellations were possible. Air India said on X that it had completed the reset on more than 40% of the planes that needed it, and that there were no cancellations so far. France’s transport minister said the issue had a limited impact in the country. Disruptions were also minimal in the U.K., Germany and Scandinavia.
Airlines for America, the trade association for the leading U.S. airlines, predicted that carriers will fly a record 31 million passengers from last Friday, Nov. 21, through this coming Monday. The FAA says it expects this year’s Thanksgiving holiday travel period to be the busiest in 15 years.
Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury apologized to customers in a post on LinkedIn.
“Our teams are working around the clock to support our operators and ensure these updates are deployed as swiftly as possible to get planes back in the sky and resume normal operations, with the safety assurance you expect from Airbus,” he wrote in a message posted on Saturday.
