Last year’s A320 fleet grounding likely cost airlines around the world more than $150 million, researchers have said, highlighting the financial risks to aviation of space weather events.
“When aircraft are grounded, airlines don’t simply lose their operating costs – they lose the profit they would have earned,” ANSTO researchers wrote.
“Understanding this distinction matters for anyone making investment decisions about radiation-hardness testing.”
The emergency software update was rolled out by Airbus following an incident involving a JetBlue A320 forced to divert after abruptly pitching down by itself mid-flight, which the planemaker said revealed that “intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical to the functioning of flight controls”.
Around 6,000 A320s worldwide were affected, including 34 of Jetstar’s 85 A320/21 family aircraft, with the alert reflected in an Emergency Airworthiness Directive from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency.
As noted by the scientists, a typical A320 generates around AU$15,000–18,000 per flight-hour and costs $10,000–11,000 per hour to run, meaning every hour it sits idle means the airline misses out on around $5,000–7,000 in profit.
“If one estimates, conservatively, that each of the approximately 6,000 affected aircraft spent three hours on the ground while software was updated, that is 18,000 aircraft-hours of lost productive time,” they wrote.
“This amounts to AU$90–126 million in forgone profit (contribution margin alone) plus fixed costs that airlines cannot avoid – crew wages, airport slot fees, lease payments, regardless of whether the aircraft flies.
“The total economic impact likely exceeds AU$150 million globally, without counting missed connections, crew repositioning or lost revenue.”
Jetstar alone was forced to cancel 90 flights due to the incident, disrupting more than 15,000 passengers and costing the airline at least $3 million; however, ANSTO noted that the “foregone profit on those flights – revenue that simply evaporated – adds millions more to the true cost”.
“These are the costs from a single software vulnerability, caught quickly, during a weekend when airlines had some scheduling flexibility,” the researchers said.
“The economic damage from a failed satellite, a defence platform taken offline, or a prolonged space-weather event affecting navigation and communications would be vastly larger.
“By comparison, the cost of building radiation-hardness testing into the design and qualification of electronics is typically well under 1 per cent of a major project’s budget.
“For a satellite mission costing AU$300 million, a comprehensive radiation test campaign might run in the low single-digit millions. For safety-critical avionics or automotive systems, the numbers are even less. Yet that spend can remove or substantially reduce single-point failure modes like the one Airbus faced.”
Air New Zealand’s A320 fleet was also affected by the November software update, but Qantas and Virgin, which also operate a limited number of A320-family aircraft, escaped unscathed.