The stock market fell 8.5% this Monday, in the first session after a software failure affected just over half of the world fleet of its flagship aircraft, the A320. Thus, Europe’s largest aircraft manufacturer is headed for its worst session since April. Airbus has stated that almost all of the 6,000 aircraft damaged: less than 100 remain to be repaired. The failure, announced last Friday (after the markets closed), affects the computer program that controls the elevation of the plane and the inclination of the wings: it makes it sensitive to interference from the sun’s rays.
Despite the sharp fall in the stock market, analysis firms maintain their positive view of the aircraft manufacturer. At Citi they point out that “it sounds dramatic, but we estimate a limited fundamental impact.” Analysts at the third largest bank in the United States estimate that the cost of repairing the failure will be between 2.5 and 7.5 million euros and maintain their advice to keep Airbus shares in their portfolio. For their part, strategists at Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest bank, have a buy advice on the stock and praise “the rapid response of the sector and the priority that Airbus has given to safety.”
The European Union Aviation Safety Agency made available to airlines, already during Friday night, the update of the A320 program to correct the failure in less than three hours. With this, the airlines fixed “practically all the defective planes” that same day, French Transport Minister Philippe Tabarot said on French television on Saturday. The hundred units still with faults are older models that will need a few weeks of physical repairs, as Airbus has announced.
Different airlines around the world have reported more than a hundred flights canceled due to the failure during the weekend that continue this Monday. Some companies are still affected. While Avianca still blocks reservations for dates until December 8, JetBlue has canceled 20 flights this Monday. The US airline said on Sunday that it expected to return 137 of its 150 affected planes to service by the beginning of the week.
With almost its entire fleet made up of A320s (232 of 286 aircraft), JetBlue is one of the most affected airlines. In addition, it was the first to report a bug in the defective software, at the end of October. On the 31st of that month, a flight from Cancun bound for Newark, near New York, had to make an emergency landing in Tampa, Florida. On the occasion, US regulators reported only one incident of “vulnerability to solar radiation.”
