Airbus Says Most of Its Recalled 6,000 A320 Jets Now Modified (reuters.com) 51
Airbus said Monday that the vast majority of around 6,000 A320-family jets affected by an emergency software recall have now been modified, leaving fewer than 100 aircraft still requiring work after a frantic weekend of repairs prompted by the discovery of a vulnerability to solar flares. The unprecedented recall -- described as the broadest emergency action in the company's history -- came after a mid-air incident on a JetBlue A320 revealed a possible link between a drop in altitude and a space-related computer bug.
The fix involved reverting to an earlier version of software that controls nose angle, uploaded via cable from a portable device called a data loader. Some older A320 jets will need entirely new computers rather than a simple software reset, raising questions about how long those aircraft will remain grounded amid global chip shortages.
Reuters separately reported on Monday that Airbus had discovered an industrial quality issue affecting metal panels of a "limited" number of A320-family aircraft. The company told the publication that it had "identified" and "contained" the source of the issue and that "all newly produced panels conform to all requirements."
The fix involved reverting to an earlier version of software that controls nose angle, uploaded via cable from a portable device called a data loader. Some older A320 jets will need entirely new computers rather than a simple software reset, raising questions about how long those aircraft will remain grounded amid global chip shortages.
Reuters separately reported on Monday that Airbus had discovered an industrial quality issue affecting metal panels of a "limited" number of A320-family aircraft. The company told the publication that it had "identified" and "contained" the source of the issue and that "all newly produced panels conform to all requirements."
Good for Airbus (Score:5, Funny)
Airbus scenario:
- Airbus: "Hey, there might be a problem, let's recall 6000 airplanes."
Boeing Scenario:
FCC: Hey, one of your plane fell down.
Boeing: Fucking thrid world pilots don't know how to fly.
FCC: Hey, one of your plane fell down once again.
Boeing: Hmmm? What?
FCC: We ground all of your planes
Boeing: Ok, we will do a recall. See?
I'll take Airbus scenario any day.
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They have given us a bit of a masterclass in engineering here. Identified a rare but important issue, took decisive action to ensure safety, and engineered a fix very quickly to get the aircraft back into service.
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They have given us a bit of a masterclass in engineering here. Identified a rare but important issue, took decisive action to ensure safety, and engineered a fix very quickly to get the aircraft back into service.
Not to mention a bit of a masterclass in integrity, ethics, and corporate responsibility.
Boeing should take a lesson here: as soon as you've identified a serious safety issue, ground your birds and fix the problem. I can't help thinking that at Boeing even their engineering problems stem more from moral, ethical and cultural deficits than from a lack of design competence.
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Airbus: Hey, lets burn CD Roms and USB thumb drives and sneaker-net the software on to 6000 planes across the planet.
This should work like Tesla firmware. Every plane has a version number on its firmware, and when an update happens the version is incremented. The planes routinely ping for updates (say every power up), and download non-critical updates when at gates with wifi. On safety critical updates, there are private networks (not to
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Congratulations on knowing absolutely nothing about the avionics industry.
Here's a hint: aircraft are purposefully not doing over-the-air updates to safety-critical systems because rapid software delivery is not needed nor wanted for safety-critical systems. To do so would INCREASE the frequency at which we see things like this, and reduce revenue service time of the aircraft if not worse.
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I'll let the entire avionics industry know that rando internet dipshit #2817221 disapproves. Meanwhile, we'll keep delivering solutions to airlines that they overwhelmingly approve of and continue spending billions of dollars to opt-in on, which comply with THEIR requirements.
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The real issue is that if you have to sneaker net updates onto planes, airlines just wont update.
This extra proves you have no idea what you are talking about. How do you think airlines load a few terabytes of entertainment videos on each aircraft? Via data loader, while the plane is on the ground having baggage removed and loaded, passengers deplaned and embarked, and the aircraft is being refueled.
Manual updates of software loads happen all the god damn time in the 40 minutes a narrow-body airliner is on the ground, from the ground ops personnel.
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https://www.panasonic.aero/cas... [panasonic.aero]
https://www.airelectro.com/blo... [airelectro.com]
https://www.flightglobal.com/a... [flightglobal.com]
Please, all of you. Run a fucking google search before you come on here sounding like a fucking idiot. You really decided to type that comment, the read it and think to yourself "Hmm. Mechanics run around every day to every plane several times each to upload news fe
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Funny how you quoted my own company to me, when I'm working on the team building connected aircraft platforms right now, and our primary partner is Airbus.
Funny how you think every airline operates the exact same way.
Hint: they do not, and you're an idiot if you think Cathay Pacific does things the exact same way that WestJet does. And that either of those are the same way that Delta, AirFrance, KLM, Alaska, United, American, etc. do things. They all have their own fleet management, and they all operate t
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They all have their own fleet management, and they all operate their fleets of airside hardware in the manner they choose.
This is incredibly stupid for a safety critical industry.
This is why a change in software services aboard aircraft does not belong with the FAA, and NIST standards should be enforceable on aviation and other industries that are critical and high-risk.
Also, LOL @ you working on connected aircraft if you really think:
How do you think airlines load a few terabytes of entertainment videos on each aircraft? Via data loader
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Yes, LOL @ me for stating how the vast majority of in-flight entertainment is loaded onto aircraft fitted with in-flight entertainment headends.
You do know that each airline chooses what media to load (i.e. pay for), yeah? And the more you license, the less you can get into the IFE headend over a T-Mobile Magenta connection. This is very basic and yet you have completely failed to grasp it.
Once again, I will re-iterate that you know absolutely nothing about how this works. For example: how good do you th
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Yes, it is how they work.
Any satellite connectivity is a part of the in-flight connectivity solution that is sequestered to the passenger WLAN.
You still don't know what the fuck you are talking about, and I'm tired of it. Stop trying to tell people that work on these systems, and develop these systems literally every day how you think they work, because you do not know anything.
Neither do they work by having an engineer walk onto a plane with terabytes of data in his hand
So when the summary of the article specifically mentions the "data loader" device that they use, you are saying that they don't us
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You all have obviously never attended an information security or serious software development class or conference in your lives. Get off
Re: Good for Airbus (Score:4, Insightful)
How long have Airbus known about it? When were the airlines notified versus this report in the media?
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Entire timeline is 4 weeks.
* October 30, 2025, JBU1230 Cancun-Newark aircraft N605JB is diverted to Miami after unexpectedly losing altitude.
* November 28, 2025: Emergency Airworthiness Directive
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There was a criminal trial against Boeing but an orange asshole had it dismissed. https://www.politico.com/news/... [politico.com]
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It is just called being professional and wanting a long-term future for your business. Boeing is all shot-term greed and incompetence.
Re:Good for Airbus (Score:4, Interesting)
A context note is that Airbus and Air France right now in an appeal trial for the AF447 crash (Rio de Janeiro - Paris) from 2009. Prosecution appealed a previous dismissal is arguing that "Airbus underestimated the risk of Pitot probe icing" and that Air France "failed to ensure quick enough replacement of suspect probes" https://aerospaceglobalnews.co... [aerospaceglobalnews.com]
Airbus now wants to give impression they are not underestimating any hardware risks and taking quick measures. Maybe they're thinking it could help them avoid sentencing for involuntary manslaughter.
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Or, and just hear me out here: they don't want anyone else to die on an Airbus aircraft, so they're fixing a recently discovered serious defect that can cause an aircraft to suddenly lose altitude against the pilot's wishes.
Not everything is an evil corporate conspiracy.
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I didn't mean it as a bad thing. I mean they evolved and are reacting faster than in the past. Not only Airbus, also the European regulators and the airlines.
The AF447 crash was a failure at several levels, including the EU governance. The reason a plane fell off the coast of Brazil and not above the USA is because the FAA had already declared those infamous old Pitot models unacceptable in their airspace, while the EASA had not made any decision. Air France was happily using the affected planes in the EU a
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That's not context. That's a conspiracy spurred by a coincidence. Airbus has addressed multiple hardware issues since 2009 for a variety of issues. There's zero evidence that this is out of the ordinary, especially since for the most part it was a simple software update for the majority of their produced fleet that is quick and easy to apply meaning it doesn't make sense not to do it under any context.
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I don't assert the existence of a conspiracy (powerful, evil, hidden group of people that pulls the strings). I am trying to figure out what's in the mind of one particular person. You could call that a "appeal to motive" (which I would fight as well, but I'd concede it's worthwhile to debate it). I clarify in another answer just above, but in short, I think the AF447 is necessarily present in the minds of the Airbus executives right now. Maybe its role is minor though.
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Boeing Scenario:
...
FCC: Hey, one of your plane fell down.
Hopefully you mean the FAA. Politicians and the Courts have problems with the FCC and just net-neutrality, so I'm sure they'd have a fit about them trying to regulate airplanes. :-)
Love it when the system works (Score:2)
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Interesting that the "EMI hardening" is a software/firmware error correction feature and not a physical shielding around the hardware like on military planes.
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Consumer passenger planes do not need to be rated against nuclear EMP. ECC memory is enough, and if you don't have ECC then you need to implement checks for cosmic-ray induced bit flips with other checksumming methods. Also, avionics systems usually act as a quorum between cluster members, so if one member has a bit flip and the other two don't agree, the bit-flip is reset.
New hardware? (Score:3)
FTA:
"Some older A320 jets will need entirely new computers rather than a simple software reset, raising questions about how long those aircraft will remain grounded amid global chip shortages."
Given the "update" is back to an older version of the software wouldn't it be easier and cheaper to wait for an update to the latest code rather than ripping out computers to replace with older hardware which will have to taken out again and re-upgraded when the fix eventually does come out?
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It might be a case of the specific version of software they want to install to fix the issue does not work with older hardware, so any aircraft that are still on it need to up upgraded. It's not uncommon for the hardware upgrade to be cheaper and faster than trying to backport the fix and fully qualify that software, especially as the aircraft can't be used until it is done.
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Older hardware not compatible with Windows 11. [Ducking and running]
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Reverting may introduce another critical fix that the current software dealt with.
Fix-forward is probably the only way to maintain safety certification for known issues. And it's not like they are ripping out half the plane here - these systems are meant to be swappable during ground service. The terminology being "Line Replaceable Unit" or LRU.
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rather than ripping out computers
I'm guessing they're modular components that can be easily swapped out. And the newer cones are probably already certified as replacements.
Great Job (Score:5, Insightful)
It's been, what, a week, and they got 6000 jets through maintenance during a very busy holiday travel season?
That speaks to fantastic logistics. There are anonymous folks out there who did a great job and deserve a ridiculously generous Christmas Bonus. :gallant bow:
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Re: Great Job (Score:2)
Well, to be fair, itâ(TM)s a firmware change, so itâ(TM)s something that can mostly be done in parallel. Set 20 planes updating the firmware and when you get to the end of the row start running the verification process. No need to spend 5 hours on each plane individually.
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Airline ground ops don't fuck around. They have to get into the electronics bay to load new entertainment options all the time anyway, so this is just plugging their data loader into a different port once they had the certified image to load.
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It's been, what, a week, and they got 6000 jets through maintenance during a very busy holiday travel season?
A recall is pretty easy to execute when for the most part it is a 15min job by a ground technician while the cleaning crew is on the plane. Also most of the world wasn't on holiday this week.
Re: Not a recall (Score:2)
It's a recall when a software update is important enough to ground planes until it's been done...
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So what would you call it if there is a software defect found in a critical safety system?
Pretty sure "recall" isn't the actual term being used in aviation anyway - that's probably some hack writer translation. The real deal is an "airworthiness directive" being issued - meaning "to be airworthy, we are directing you to do this action" and if you don't by the time on the airworthiness directive, you won't be certified for revenue service - you'll need to get a "ferry" permit to fly the thing to the closest
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It's not a recall when you do a firmware update on our phone or laptop.
It would be if your firmware update addressed a safety issue on your phone or laptop.
E.g. The Google Pixel 4a was very much subject to a "recall" for a firmware update.
Here's the UK government on that phone: https://www.gov.uk/product-saf... [www.gov.uk]
Here's the Australian government on that phone: https://www.productsafety.gov.... [productsafety.gov.au]
Apparently the CPSC didn't give a shit in the USA, but Google still sent out a recall notice to all Pixel 4a owners.
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Right. It's a recall when you need to get a certified technician to do it.
Did they fix anything? (Score:2)
They are claiming to have identified and fixed a bug caused by solar radiation flipping a bit, and a software fix and rollout, all in a weekend? That sounds suspicious.
How do you even evaluate the issue was caused by solar radiation? That's like a joke excuse we used to use when we couldn't find a root cause and didn't feel expending more resources was worth it.
bad hardware? (Score:2)
Sounds to me like they originally tried to compensate for flaky hardware using software, then somebody decided they didn't really need that software. Was this a memory issue? Were they even using ECC memory? Or was it a more significant issue, like using silicon where they should be using a more radiation-resistance material like GaAs.
Or it may simply be that in a multiply-redundant system, the software that switches to a backup system failed to prevent bad stuff during the switchover. Reports are that t