Airbus software issue may cause flight delays during busy Thanksgiving weekend

Thousands of Airbus A320 airliners around the world might require a software update, potentially causing flight delays or cancellations during the busy Thanksgiving holiday weekend.

The emergency update stems from an incident Oct. 30 when a JetBlue flight traveling from Cancun, Mexico, to Newark, New Jersey, experienced an issue with its flight controls. The plane dropped about 100 feet in seven seconds, according to preliminary flight data from Flightradar24, and was diverted to Tampa, Florida.

Between 15 and 20 people were injured and taken to area hospitals upon landing, according to Vivian Shedd, a spokesperson for Tampa Fire Rescue.

Airbus identified an apparent issue relating to “intense solar radiation,” which “may corrupt data critical to the functioning of flight controls” and recommended an emergency software update to the A320 family of aircraft – a common passenger plane for U.S. carriers.

The European Union Aviation Safety Agency, the EU’s equivalent to the Federal Aviation Administration, issued an emergency order Friday grounding Airbus A320 family aircraft containing a certain hardware and software combination.

The order goes into effect Saturday at 7 p.m. EST. At that point planes awaiting the updates would be essentially grounded. The order allows for the planes to be flown up to three times without passengers to get them to a location for the fix.

Airbus sources told CBS News that 5,000 to 6,000 airplanes will require software updates.

The FAA is expected to issue an emergency order soon.

Several U.S. carriers use the Airbus A320 family in their fleet. Spirit and Frontier only fly the A320 family of planes, with many popular carriers maintaining several hundred in their fleet.

Delta flies about 315 A320 jets, United has about 200 planes and American has around 480 planes.

United told CBS News the order impacts six aircraft in its Airbus fleet. Delta expects only a small portion of its A320 fleet, less than 50 aircraft, to be impacted by the updates.

American Airlines said in a statement to CBS News Friday evening that it had downgraded the number of impacted aircraft from more than 340 to 209, and that it expected the majority of those 209 to be updated by Friday “and through the night.”

“All aircraft will be completed ahead of the EASA Emergency Airworthiness Directive taking effect tomorrow at 6 p.m. CT,” American said in a statement.

Airlines for America, the trade association for the leading U.S. airlines, predicted that carriers will fly a record 31 million passengers from last Friday, Nov. 21, through this coming Monday. The FAA says it expects this year’s Thanksgiving holiday travel period to be the busiest in 15 years.

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