A screen displays delays in IndiGo flights at Delhi’s IGI on Saturday. According to DGCA, 82% of the 338 Indian aircraft had been updated by Saturday evening. IndiGo announced before midnight that it had completed the task of updating its 200 affected jets
NEW DELHI: A cosmic curveball forced a frantic fix as Indian operators of Airbus’s best-selling A320 aircraft worked through the weekend to undo a software upgrade now tied to solar-flare risk.They rushed to roll back flight-control updates on 338 identified aircraft. IndiGo, Air India and Air India Express expect to finish the downgrade by late Saturday-Sunday night, averting what regulators warned could have caused pilots to briefly lose control during intense radiation events. Not all A320s were impacted.Working under DGCA supervision, airlines pushed the fixes without grounding fleets and avoiding mass cancellations at the peak of holiday travel. Updates took roughly 40-50 minutes for each aircraft. By 5.30pm Saturday, only four Air India Express flights were cancelled, with carriers bracing for delays of up to 90 minutes.According to DGCA, IndiGo, the world’s largest A320 operator, had updated 184 of 200 affected jets by Saturday evening; Air India 69 of 113; Air India Express 17 of 25 – 278 aircraft, or 82% of the 338 flagged globally in Indian fleets. IndiGo announced before midnight it had completed the task. Earlier, IndiGo said on X its engineers had completed updates on 160 of 200 mandated aircraft by Saturday evening, with “minimal delays and zero cancellations”, and expected to meet all deadlines.Air India said its teams had worked “round-the-clock,” anticipated full compliance within EASA’s timelines and reported “no cancellations” due to the task, though some flights would run slightly late.Air India Express said most of its A320 fleet was already compliant and remaining aircraft were on track, crediting coordinated work across engineering, operations and safety teams.Airbus triggered the scramble late Friday after directing operators to revert flight control computers to a 2022 software build. Regulators in Europe, India and US quickly issued emergency orders.The move followed an Oct 30 JetBlue A320 event in which the jet allegedly pitched nose-down without pilot input while flying Cancun-Newark. The aircraft diverted to Tampa, where 15-20 passengers injured in the uncontrolled descent were hospitalised. Investigators later linked the issue to an upgrade, dubbed L104, for the elevator and aileron computer (ELAC).Airbus warned that solar radiation could corrupt data critical to flight controls on certain software-hardware combinations, prompting operators to revert to the older build on susceptible jets.Indian carriers received the first late-night alert around 9.30pm Friday. “At first, it seemed a much bigger issue that would require grounding and a massive impact,” said an official managing the response. Coordinated work across multiple maintenance bases revealed the rollback could be completed in under 50 minutes on newer aircraft, while older jets required additional hardware changes.Global carriers also cancelled and delayed services as the scale of the alert briefly appeared to run into thousands of aircraft before being narrowed to a smaller subset. Airbus said it acted after analysing an event “revealing that intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical to the functioning of flight controls”, adding it worked with regulators to ensure fleets remained safe.
