A global rush has begun as airlines face major disruptions after Airbus warned that nearly 6,000 A320 aircraft may require urgent software checks. The alert has hit right in the peak holiday travel weekend, with Thanksgiving pressure adding to delays, cancellations, and rising passenger frustration, says aviation expert Anita Mendiratta.
00:00The A320 aircraft, which is one of the Airbus family's strongest aircraft because of the fact that it handles about 140 to 240 passengers and is perfect for city to city hops within a country or within a region, it recently underwent an issue with its software.
00:17Basically, there was issues in terms of the way in which the aircraft was responding because of the solar impact and the electromagnetic fields that it was impacting.
00:27The first incident that took place on October the 30th, which was with JetBlue, an American airline, was one that was extremely unusual.
00:36And therefore, the diagnostic work that needed to happen with Airbus to identify exactly what the problem was took time because as we know, it's now a software related issue.
00:46It could have been the hardware as well. So they've had to put time into significant testing.
00:51Once they found out what the problem was, the fact that they proactively went out and put out the alert to the entire aviation system, which is airlines around the world, was the responsible thing to do.
01:03But you can just imagine the pressure that was felt when that call was having to be made, knowing the impact it was going to have on your airline customers.
01:10The scale of the issue is quite significant. There are over 6,000 A320s in the entire global fleet that exists from Airbus across a world of airline passengers and customers.
01:24And ultimately, when we look at that, it's not all 6,000, but all 6,000 need to be examined to identify, do they have that exact software?
01:32And if they do, what is the fix going to be?
01:36The challenge is that this is one of the busiest travel weekends in the entire year, especially in the U.S., because we know of the fact that it's Thanksgiving weekend.
01:45There are an estimated 45,000 to 50,000 flights across the U.S. this weekend alone on Sunday and on Saturday.
01:53So it's a very difficult one in terms of the impact, not only on the aircraft, the number of aircraft out there,
02:00but on traveller confidence and the ability for them to be able to travel without frustration and depending on their airline.
02:09This is an exceptionally rare incident.
02:11And in terms of scale of the callback that's coming in from Airbus, it's the first time in 55 years they've had an incident like this.
02:18What's important about this as well is that it absolutely has to do with the model, the A320,
02:24which is really about the future of flight and sustainable aviation.
02:27But critically, it's about the reputation of Airbus per se.
02:31And this is why it was so important that they proactively put out the message for the callback on those aircraft rather than there being more incidents.
02:40Because when it comes to aviation, there is nothing more important than safety and trust.
02:44The impact on the aircrafts and what has happened now with the issues of solar radiation, this is because of environmental changes.
02:52So it really is about the airlines and the aircraft manufacturers being able to adjust their hardware and their software to be able to manage continually safety of flight.
03:03But this is something that we need to now put on the radar because we know that changes in the environment are directly going to have an impact on changes of our ability to be transported through whatever means.
03:14Because when it comes to aviation, we're trying to get to the air from the aircraft.
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