Airlines complete software upgrades for 323 operational A320 family planes

Aviation regulator DGCA on Sunday said Indian carriers have completed the software upgrades on 323 operational A320 family planes to address a potential issue related to flight controls.

On Friday, Airbus said intense solar radiation might corrupt data critical to flight controls in a significant number of A320 family aircraft and that the software changes required to fix the issue would lead to operational disruptions.

A total of 338 A320 family aircraft with the three Indian airlines -- IndiGo, Air India and Air India Express -- were initially identified for the software upgrades to address the issue.

Among them, 323 were operational, 6 were under base maintenance and later it was found that the upgrades were no needed for 9 such planes in the fleet of Air India, according to a senior DGCA official.

IndiGo has completed the upgrades on all the 200 of its operational A320 family planes.

Air India had 113 affected aircraft and out of them, the upgrades have been done for the operational 100 planes while 4 are under base maintenance and 9 aircraft did not require the modifications, as per the official.

In the case of Air India Express, upgrades have been carried out for 23 A320 family planes and 2 such aircraft are under maintenance for redelivery.

On Saturday, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) issued an Airworthiness Directive to airlines asking Indian operators to carry out the requisite software upgrades immediately.

This followed Airbus issuing an alert to operators globally and the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) coming out with an Emergency Airworthiness Directive regarding the potential issue.

On Friday, EASA said Airbus asked airline operators to install a serviceable Elevator Aileron Computer (ELAC) in the impacted aircraft. ELAC is for flight controls.