Airbus A320s Require Emergency Work Over Solar Radiation Flight Control Issue

We’ll have to mark this as “developing” for now, but it sounds like we could see some short term issues with Airbus A320 family aircraft in the coming days and weeks…

Airbus announces precautionary A320 fleet action

Airbus has just released a statement, explaining that a large number of Airbus A320 family aircraft may need to be temporarily grounded, after a recent incident revealed that intense solar radiation can corrupt data critical to the functioning of flight controls. Here’s Airbus’ full statement:

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 has consequently identified a significant number of A320 Family aircraft currently in-service which may be impacted.

Airbus has worked proactively with the aviation authorities to request immediate precautionary action from operators via an Alert Operators Transmission (AOT) in order to implement the available software and/or hardware protection, and ensure the fleet is safe to fly. This AOT will be reflected in an Emergency Airworthiness Directive from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA).

Airbus acknowledges these recommendations will lead to operational disruptions to passengers and customers. We apologise for the inconvenience caused and will work closely with operators, while keeping safety as our number one and overriding priority.

CNBC suggests that this could impact 6,000 aircraft in service, roughly half of the Airbus A320 family aircraft that are currently flying around the world.

I believe this is all related to an incident that happened on October 30, 2025, where a JetBlue A320 experienced a flight control issue resulting from a computer malfunction. Specifically, the plane pitched down without any input from the pilots, causing around 15 people to be hospitalized.

This could impact airline operations quite a bit

Officially, there are limited details as to how long this fix will take, and how quickly it needs to happen. JonNYC reports that American may soon be grounding much of its Airbus A320 family fleet, and that this fix will take a minimum of two hours per aircraft, and in some cases, much longer than that.

Two hours might not sound like a lot, but that’s the minimum amount of time the fix takes, and that could really add up. After all, planes often don’t have much slack in their schedule, and a delay of two hours across a large fleet could have big implications.

We also don’t know how soon this fix has to take place — can it just happen the next time a plane has an overnight at an airport with maintenance staff for the airline, or does it have to happen ASAP?

So we’ll see how this plays out, but if you see some issues with Airbus A320 family reliability in the coming days, now you know why.

Bottom line

A new Emergency Airworthiness Directive is impacting Airbus A320 family aircraft, over concerns that solar radiation can cause flight control issues. It sounds like thousands of Airbus aircraft will require fixes, which are expected to take a minimum of a couple of hours.

It remains to be seen with what timeline this all happens, but I definitely imagine this will impact airline schedules a bit in the coming days. At least it’s not Boeing, for once, I guess?