Airbus Blames Cosmic Rays After JetBlue A320 Plunges Midflight; Dozens Hurt, Fleet Grounded

Airbus Points To Space Radiation After Violent Midair Drop

After taking off from Cancun on October 30, a full JetBlue Airbus A320 bound for Newark climbed to its cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. Passengers had begun to relax when the aircraft suddenly and violently lost altitude. Pilots regained control and diverted to make an emergency landing in Florida.

The descent was abrupt enough that at least three passengers struck the cabin ceiling and suffered head lacerations. In total, 15 people were taken to hospitals for treatment.

Suspected Cause: Single-Event Upset From High-Energy Particles

Investigators initially reported an unclear cause. In the days that followed, Airbus grounded more than 6,000 aircraft while engineers probed flight data. Airbus said preliminary analysis points to unusually intense space radiation at the time of the incident that may have corrupted data used by flight-control systems.

Engineers call these incidents single-event upsets. High-energy, subatomic particles—originating from solar activity or distant cosmic sources such as supernovae—can strike a computer memory cell and flip a binary bit from 0 to 1 or vice versa. A single bit-flip can change a parameter inside firmware or software and trigger unexpected behavior in critical systems.

According to BBC reporting, the error was logged in the A320’s ELAC (Elevator Aileron Computer) system, which controls surfaces on the wings and tail. Airbus said it is issuing software updates to refresh corrupted parameters rapidly so that a transient error cannot propagate into flight controls.

Context and Examples

Single-event upsets are well documented. In benign examples, a cosmic-ray–induced bit flip has been credited with altering a value that helped a Super Mario 64 speedrunner shave seconds off a record. In more consequential cases, bit flips have been linked to incorrect vote tallies and other unexpected faults in electronics.

“On that particular day… there wasn’t anything special going on in terms of solar radiation,” Keith Ryden, Professor of Space Engineering at the University of Surrey, told the BBC, expressing skepticism about the solar-radiation explanation.

If solar activity was not unusually strong, the disruptive particles could have come from deeper space. The Earth is constantly bombarded by high-energy particles; scientists noted the Sun produced a large solar storm the month before the incident.

What Airbus Is Doing

As part of a wide-reaching precautionary response, Airbus is deploying software mitigations across affected A320-family aircraft. The update is designed to detect and rapidly refresh any corrupted parameter values so they cannot affect flight-control commands. Investigations into the Newark-bound flight continue.

Why this matters: Modern airliners rely heavily on electronic flight-control systems rather than purely mechanical linkages, increasing exposure to transient electronic faults. This event highlights how rare cosmic phenomena can sometimes interfere with critical systems and the importance of resilient software and redundancy.

Reporting continues as authorities and Airbus examine flight-data recorders and refine software protections across the fleet.