Finnair confirmed in the early hours of 1 December that its engineering teams had finished loading emergency software fixes on 12 Airbus A320-family aircraft, narrowly beating a 24-hour compliance window set by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). The directive reversed a recent flight-control-computer update after Airbus warned of a possible data-corruption risk under intense solar-radiation conditions.
Working overnight in Helsinki, three maintenance shifts completed the uploads without pulling aircraft into extended downtime, limiting passenger impact to a handful of 45-minute delays on Friday-night departures. With the patch applied, Finnair’s Saturday schedule ran normally, though the airline has kept one narrow-body jet in reserve and will monitor telemetry for 48 hours.
![Finnair races to install Airbus software patch hours before EASA grounding deadline]()
For mobility managers the incident is a timely reminder of how technical air-worthiness directives can cascade into sudden capacity shortfalls. More than 6,000 A320s worldwide were affected, and several Asian and Latin-American carriers grounded aircraft temporarily, causing connection gaps for Finnish expatriates heading to project sites via partner airlines.
Finnair’s rapid response underscores the resilience benefits of an in-house Part-145 maintenance unit adjacent to its home hub—a fact relocation specialists may weigh when choosing preferred carriers on mission-critical routes. Companies are advised to verify that other airlines in their travel programmes have also complied with the software rollback to avoid last-minute disruptions.
Working overnight in Helsinki, three maintenance shifts completed the uploads without pulling aircraft into extended downtime, limiting passenger impact to a handful of 45-minute delays on Friday-night departures. With the patch applied, Finnair’s Saturday schedule ran normally, though the airline has kept one narrow-body jet in reserve and will monitor telemetry for 48 hours.
For mobility managers the incident is a timely reminder of how technical air-worthiness directives can cascade into sudden capacity shortfalls. More than 6,000 A320s worldwide were affected, and several Asian and Latin-American carriers grounded aircraft temporarily, causing connection gaps for Finnish expatriates heading to project sites via partner airlines.
Finnair’s rapid response underscores the resilience benefits of an in-house Part-145 maintenance unit adjacent to its home hub—a fact relocation specialists may weigh when choosing preferred carriers on mission-critical routes. Companies are advised to verify that other airlines in their travel programmes have also complied with the software rollback to avoid last-minute disruptions.
