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NEW DELHI: Indian operators of the world’s highest selling single aisle Airbus A320 family planes — IndiGo, Air India and AI Express — have completed the software update on affected fleet in just over a day. They informed the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) early Sunday morning that 323 have got the required “downgrade” to an earlier version of “elevator and aileron computer” (ELAC) or flight control computer. A 2022 upgrade could potentially cause pilots to lose control amid intense solar storms, something that happened on a US budget airliner on Oct 30 that left 15 passengers injured. This necessitated a “downgrade” to the earlier version.IndiGo, the world’s largest operator of A320 family planes, has completed the task on all 200 of the affected planes. Air India on 100, instead of earlier identified 113 as nine planes were eventually found not requiring the update and four being under base maintenance. Air India Express completed the update on 23 of 25 planes as two are under maintenance for redelivery.The quick response by Indian carriers and DGCA meant there were groundings leading to mass cancellations as was initially feared on Friday night when Airbus had first informed them about this issue. AI Group and IndiGo coordinated under DGCA’s supervision to ensure the task is completed without disruptions. “We got a call from Airbus on Friday night about this issue. Initially it was felt hundred of planes will need to be grounded over this weekend and normalcy could return by Monday or Tuesday. Then we figured each new plane update will take 40-50 minutes and doing the task over multiple bases will mean the task can be accomplished without grounding the fleets,” said senior officials who handled the task. So planes got updates and kept returning to service. So Indian carriers fared better — single digit flight cancellations and some delays upto 90 minutes — as IndiGo has a young A320 family fleet and AI Group has only a few older versions. On the new planes the update required a 40-50 minute task. The older planes, however, require some hardware update too and therefore the task would take longer.Globally the impact was felt much more. Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury apologised for the impatient but reiterated that the same was a must for safety. “The fix required on some A320 aircraft has been causing significant logistical challenges and delays since (Friday). I want to sincerely apologise to our airline customers and passengers who are impacted now. But we consider that nothing is more important than safety when people fly on one of our Airbus Aircraft – like millions do every day. Our teams are working around the clock to support our operators and ensure these updates are deployed as swiftly as possible to get planes back in the sky and resume normal operations, with the safety assurance you expect from Airbus,” Faury said on X.Airbus had issued the alerts for urgently reverting the A320 family flight control computers’ software to an older 2022 version late on Friday night, followed by emergency directives to the effect from regulatory agencies of places like Europe, India and the US. This came after finding the “upgrade” responsible for an American low cost carrier JetBlue’s A320 experiencing a sudden nose down without pilot input while operating from Cancun to Newark on Oct 30, 2025. This aircraft had diverted to Tampa, where 15-20 passengers injured in the uncontrolled descent were hospitalised. Subsequently, a software upgrade issued in 2022 for the “elevator and aileron computer” (ELAC) or flight control computer was found responsible for this uncontrolled descent. So airlines had to revert to the older software version on identified A320 family aircraft that could have faced this problem during solar flares.