MOBILE, Ala. – There may be flight delays on the way home. Airbus sent out a mandatory software upgrade for its A320 family aircraft on Friday evening.
The $600 million, 53-acre “Airbus US Manufacturing Facility” has been called Mobile Home since 2015.
In fact, this center in Mobile was the airline's first American production site for the A320 aircraft.
The software upgrade was shipped during one of the busiest times of the year.
This is in response to a software error in October that caused the aircraft to nosedive slightly.
Experts believe that solar flares triggered the incident.
“There are conditions for the software to do this and have something like a heart over the nose down, a rarity,” said Richard Levy, American Airlines captain (retired).
In October, a JetBlue flight from Cancun to Newark, New Jersey crashed.
“I felt like I was going to die,” said passenger Terrica Turner.
Airbus, which has been calling mobile homes since 2007, said the flight control software was damaged by sunlight.
“When there is sunspot activity, this intense solar radiation reacts and gives a false signal to this computer, as if the crew had given that signal,” Levy said. “They didn't, and then the elevator in the back of the plane moved and the nose went down and their passengers were injured there.”
Several people were thrown from their seats. About 15 people were taken to hospital.
“If you're driving nose-forward like that and you're not wearing a seatbelt, you're going to get out of your seat,” Levy said.
“It was such a violent, sudden fall,” said passenger Shelly Walsh. “The flight attendant went completely horizontal, hit the ceiling and flew back to the ground.”
Airbus immediately sent out its “airworthiness directive,” including a software update to be carried out this weekend.
“These Airbus 319, 320 and 320 family aircraft will not be flown until they have the software update,” Levy said.
Around 6,000 Airbus aircraft require the software upgrade. The upgrade itself takes two hours per aircraft.
“The software will be able to do that; when there is sunspot activity again, hopefully it won't do that, and I doubt it will be reactive,” Levy said. “The computers will not respond to sunspot activity.”
American Airlines has the largest fleet of A320 aircraft. The upgrades were completed by early afternoon.
Airbus issued a statement on Saturday saying the update had caused “significant logistical challenges and delays.”
“At this point, I expect there will be scheduled disruptions and some cancellations,” Levy said. “What the airlines are doing in this case is they're swapping equipment, swapping aircraft and changing schedules. So there's definitely going to be some delays and minor inconveniences. But as we know, we just said American has almost completed it.”
American and Delta Airlines have repaired all of their planes.
United and Southwest did not have any of the affected models.
No flights to our local airports were affected by the update.
It is impossible to say whether this has had an impact on the production line.