Airbus to repair nearly 1,000 planes, outage affects airports worldwide

Airbus has announced immediate repairs to 6,000 A320 family aircraft due to a software bug. According to data released on Friday, the planes must undergo an update or they cannot fly.

The flight management system failure was caused by solar flares, the incident is being investigated by the US FAA. The fix will take about two hours, but the problem could disrupt operations over the weekend.

Airlines affected include American Airlines, Lufthansa, easyJet and IndiGo. The airlines have to switch to an older version of the software in the computer that determines the angle of attack of the nose of the aircraft and, for older machines, replace some of the hardware.

Airbus said on Saturday that the interventions may be less onerous than originally expected, and the number of planes requiring hardware replacement will be fewer than the 1,000 originally estimated.

The repair must be done before the planes return to service with passengers and takes two to three hours per machine.

In total, there are approximately 11,300 narrow-body aircraft in service, including 6,440 A320 models. Data from Cirium and FlightAware showed that most of the world's airports experienced only moderate delays.

Wizz Air said it completed the upgrades on all affected aircraft overnight. AirAsia plans to complete the repairs within 48 hours.

(reuters, hal)