The story so far: Airbus ordered software and hardware upgrades to an estimated 6,000 of its widely flown Airbus A320 family of aircraft across the world. This followed from an investigation of an inflight incident, on October 30, 2025, involving JetBlue flight B61230 from Cancun Mexico to Newark in the U.S., a distance of about 2,500 kilometres with a flight time of about three hours 30 minutes. The airline is a U.S.-based low-cost airline.
What happened to the Jetblue flight?
Flight B6-1230 was in U.S. airspace at about 35,000 feet when the aircraft experienced what was termed as an inflight upset that left some of the passengers injured and in need of medical aid on the ground. The crew, who reported flight control issues, decided to land in Tampa, Florida about 25 minutes after the incident, which was identified as an “uncommanded pitch-down event even as the autopilot was engaged”.
In investigations in the U.S., involving the Federal Aviation Administration as well as the National Transportation Safety Board, one of the aircraft’s two elevator aileron computers (ELAC) was identified to have been faulty.
What does the ELAC do?
The Airbus A320 family (like in the other Airbus aircraft families) has a fly-by-wire system, where flight crew moves/inputs through the sidesticks are converted to electronic signals. These are processed by the aircraft’s flight control computers. Of these, the ELACs control the elevator and aileron controls which make the aircraft pitch up or down or bank left or right.
What was the issue?
David Kaminski-Morrow, Air Transport Editor, FlightGlobal, told The Hindu that the issue relates to a possible vulnerability in a relatively new software update specifically developed for the A320 aircraft family. This software version is intended for the ELAC. The software upgrade incorporates new protective features for the aircraft’s ‘flight envelope’, which is intended to assist the pilot during abnormal situations.
Airbus believes that this system is susceptible to solar radiation where energetic particles entering the earth’s atmosphere can alter digital data and affect the avionics of aircraft, which, in turn, could corrupt information being transmitted by the ELAC flight-control computer and cause unexpected consequences. The nature of the suspected vulnerability in this case has not been disclosed, he said.
He said that Airbus feels that the software needs to be more resilient to such risks. The A320 operators affected have been instructed to ensure that the ELAC is in a particular configuration which, in most cases, involves uninstalling the new software and going back to using a previous version. On November 28, Airbus, through an Alert Operators Transmission, advised airlines operating the Airbus A320 family with ELAC B hardware (software version L104) to replace it with software version L103+ .
The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) also issued an emergency Airworthiness Directive highlighting the issue and recommendation.
What has happened in India?
India’s regulator, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), moved quickly to ensure that Airbus operators in India — Indigo, Air India and its low-cost subsidiary Air India Express — complied with the directive. In a stringent order, it said that no aircraft should continue in service without meeting the required safety standards. The DGCA circular of November 29, put the number of affected aircraft in India at 338 jets: Indigo (200), Air India (113), Air India Express (25).
In the case of Indigo, the upgrade was done at the airline’s base stations in Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkata. For Air India, the aircraft affected were a mix of new and older Airbus A320 variants and the upgrade was done at its base stations in New Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Chennai. Air India Express had the “precautionary safety upgrade” done at base stations in Delhi, Bengaluru and Chennai. Contrary to expectations of major flight disruptions in India, the three operators completed the work quickly, with hardly any impact on schedules.
How has it been globally?
Aerospace firm Thales, the supplier of the ELAC, said that its hardware “complied fully with Airbus specifications and regulatory certifications, and that the vulnerable functionality involves software outside the company’s responsibility”.
Globally, most airlines have completed the work, with estimates of the number of aircraft left to be 100 or less. Several airlines revised the number of planes impacted as well as the time it would take for the work to be completed, which Airbus had estimated to be between two to three hours an aircraft. One operator, Colombia’s Avianca, stopped flight bookings until December 8, but has revised the date to December 5, after receiving software support from France for its Airbus fleet.
A media report said that the fix involved uploading the previous software version with a cable from a device called a data loader. In some instances, the delays to the upgrade have been due to airlines not having enough data loaders. In some older aircraft, the report said that new hardware would have to be installed, which would cause delays. An additional issue was airline maintenance capabilities as well as global supply chain issues.
Published – December 04, 2025 08:30 am IST
