“It seems a bit bizarre; it is something it [Airbus] has to look at, it’s obvious it wasn’t tested,” Fernandez told South China Morning Post. Fernandez speculated that Airbus might be stressed by commitments to meet its current goal of producing 820 planes in 2025.
Apart from the eye-catching radiation storyline, the surface cause was described as a problem in the Elevator Aileron Computer (ELAC 2) software, which manages the aircraft’s pitch and roll by sending commands from the pilot’s side-stick to elevators at its rear. The software rollback involved restoring a version dubbed “L103,” replacing “L104.” Thales, developer of the ELAC hardware, told Reuters that the software involved was not its responsibility.
The sudden nose-down movement experienced by the JetBlue passengers bound for Newark could also affect a wide variety of Airbus models, not only the A320: multiple variations of the A319 and A321 series are also affected. One estimate speculated that more than 3,000 A320 jets were in the air around the time of the Airbus announcement. Picture those passengers on November 28, many equipped with WiFi on board, reading about this software vulnerability and mentally reworking their safety calculations.
