Overview
- On Oct. 30, a JetBlue A320 from Cancun to Newark suddenly lost altitude and diverted to Tampa, where roughly 15 to 20 passengers were evaluated and taken to hospitals with non-life-threatening injuries.
- Airbus said its analysis indicated intense solar radiation may have corrupted flight-control data, identified many in-service A320-family aircraft at risk, briefly grounded affected jets, and pushed immediate software updates to more than 6,000 planes with some hardware changes required.
- Space-radiation specialists, including Clive Dyer of the University of Surrey, argue solar activity that day was unremarkable and suggest a high‑energy cosmic ray from a distant supernova more plausibly triggered a single‑event upset in avionics.
- Company and regulatory summaries describe a malfunction in the computer controlling elevator surfaces that produced an unintended nose‑down command, with authorities warning such errors can cause uncommanded movements that challenge structural limits.
- Neither Airbus nor the FAA has endorsed the supernova hypothesis, the exact trigger remains unconfirmed, and experts cite the 2008 Qantas Flight 72 incident as a possible precedent for particle‑induced upsets in modern aircraft electronics.