US air regulator demands airlines replace Airbus software before Sunday

New York.- The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) required this Saturday airlines to replace or modify by tomorrow the Airbus software in which problems have been detected. The FAA said today on its X profile that it has issued an Emergency Airworthiness Directive (EAD) for certain Airbus A319 and A320/321 aircraft.

“The EAD requires replacing or modifying the software that controls the aircraft’s elevator” and comes into effect “immediately,” clarified the regulator.

According to the directive, operators must replace the software before the planes fly again at 00:01 on Sunday, November 30, and it is also prohibited to install it on any aircraft. Airbus warned airlines yesterday that fly with the A320 of the need to update their software in part of that fleet, after detecting an incident in a flight control program caused by exposure to sunlight. According to the company, this may affect “a significant number of A320 family aircraft”, and various industry sources estimate around 6,000 affected models. The software problems were detected after a Jetblue flight between Cancun (Mexico) and Newark (New Jersey) had to make an emergency landing in Florida after abruptly losing altitude.

You may be interested in: Possible global chaos in flights: Airbus calls for urgent review of more than 6,000 aircraft

American airlines are already working to solve the problem; American Airlines, for example, said this morning in a statement that only four aircraft remained to be updated, out of a total of 209 aircraft that included this software. For its part, Delta assured in a note collected by CNN that less than 50 of its A321neo models will be affected, and anticipated that it would solve the problem before this morning.