Bad business when the chief executive of an aircraft manufacturer has to apologize. The CEO of Airbus, Guillaume Faury, did so last week on the professional network Linkedin for a serious problem after a long time of apparent calm in the house. For more than seven years, accidents and economic losses have been the shadow of the American rival Boeing. Now, the popular Airbus A320 model has revealed faults in the flight control system, and that is no small feat for one of the best-selling aircraft in the world, with some 11,300 units taking off every day.
Despite Airbus’ quick reaction, since the incident in the navigation control software was resolved in just over 48 hours, the company’s value has decreased by 3,160 million euros on the Stock Market since the opening on Monday, December 1 (it lost 9,400 million). The European manufacturer, which had well studied the Boeing casetry to avoid staying in the nebula of uncertainty at all costs.
The alarms for Airbus and different air safety regulators were activated more than a month ago, when an A320 from the American JetBlue had to make an emergency landing at the Tampa airport (Florida, USA). The incident recorded on October 30 on the Cancun (Mexico)-New Jersey (USA) crossing responded to the failure of a key component for flight control, the ELAC (Elevator and Aileron Computer). The pilot felt a brief and limited descent of the aircraft, totally unexpected. It was later learned that the software was damaged by intense solar radiation.
As a consequence, on Friday, November 28, 6,000 units of the A320 family (includes the A319, the A320, the A321 and their different variants) were called for an urgent change of the ELAC, with practically the entire air sector affected.
The Spanish Iberia, Vueling and Volotea, and references such as British Airways, Lufthansa, Air France, ITA, Aer Lingus, TAP and Easyjet, received the notification from the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). In America, companies such as Latam, Avianca, Delta, United and American Airlines have also had to review their A320s. The latter alone has acted on 340 of its 480 A320 aircraft. Although the strange behavior of the Jetblue A320 did not have serious consequences for the passenger or the integrity of the plane, the European regulator EASA spoke of a failure that “can cause an uncontrolled movement of the elevator that could exceed the structural capacity of the aircraft.” Official Airbus sources report that “the ELAC security issue is almost completely closed. All aircraft have received the software update and can fly, except for those that are in storage or undergoing intensive maintenance, and these must be updated before returning to service.”
The technical department of the Spanish pilots union Sepla does not downplay the importance of the breakdown one bit. Pilot Roberto Castelo, with more than 2,500 hours at the controls of the A320, explains that “the ELAC, Elevator and Aileron Computer, is the processor that is responsible for translating the orders of the pilot, or in his case the autopilot, to the horizontal (ailerons) and vertical (elevators) flight controls. Specifically, the failure identified in the ELAC B L104 could be given in the orders to the elevators, sending an erroneous signal that would not have been emitted by the pilot or the autopilot. This could cause the plane to descend, which at low altitudes can be catastrophic if there is no reaction time.
Is the stability of Airbus in danger or is this a minor setback? After learning that the problem could be easily addressed, Citi analysts spoke of a setback that “sounds dramatic”, but with a “limited fundamental impact.” At Deutsche Bank they highlighted the “rapid response of the sector and the priority that Airbus has given to safety.” The French Minister of Transport, Philippe Tabarot, even went to the media to ask for calm: “Airbus has assumed its responsibilities and has demonstrated full transparency.” The investigations to which Boeing was subjected were weighing, in case it had hidden sensitive information from the air safety authorities before different accidents.
Airbus received a second blow on Monday, December 1, and again with the A320 in the pillory. The new defect was detected in the fuselage panels of aircraft that are mostly yet to be delivered. The company acted quickly again and pointed to external causes, “a quality problem with suppliers in the fuselage panels.” All suspicions point to the Sevillian company Sofitec, about which it has been impossible to obtain an opinion. On this occasion, 628 units were inspected through scanner because the thickness of the panels was excessive at times, and insufficient at others.
Airbus detected what was then a possible failure in the summer and it is now that it has had the results of its analysis. He reviewed his production lines and says he has identified “the origin of the problem” and that “all the new production panels already meet all the requirements.” This, notes a company spokesperson, “was an issue that does not compromise quality or safety.”
The slip at the factory translates into a lower capacity to produce planes: Airbus indicated to the market that it could finally deliver 790 aircraft this year, compared to the 820 planned before the fuselage fiasco. Bad news, although the economic impact will barely be seen in the short-term income statement. The management headed by Gillaume Faury has maintained the economic estimates for the entire year: around 7,000 million in operating profit (ebit) and a free cash flow before financing to clients of around 4,500 million euros.
The weight that the A320 has in Airbus gives an idea that 392 of the 507 devices that the company had distributed at the end of the third quarter were from that family. The rest is divided between the A220 (62 units), A330 (20 aircraft) and A350 (33), the last two for long-distance routes. Even the Pope’s plane is an A320 (of the airline ITA), whose software had to be changed in an emergency in Istanbul (Turkey) when the Pontiff was on an official trip to Turkey and Lebanon.
This narrow-body classic, designed for short and medium-haul routes, competes with the highly sought-after B737MAX. The Boeing plane may also be the most investigated plane in history due to the serious accidents that it caused before the pandemic and that put the greatest exponent of the North American industry in check.
Boeing, against the ropes
The B737MAX was involved in the fatal accidents on October 29, 2018 (Lion Air flight in Indonesia, with 189 fatalities) and on March 11, 2019 (Ethiopian Airlines flight in which all 157 occupants of the plane died), which forced production to stop. It was looked at nut by nut and wire by wire.
Boeing is having a hard time turning around despite the massive change of management, the change in production systems and the response to the offensive by air regulators around the world. Its most emblematic aircraft, such as the A320 for Airbus, is the spearhead of the commercial strategy: until the end of September, 330 of the 440 aircraft distributed among clients were from the B737 family.
The North American company’s stock was around $293 in January 2018 and is now moving around $202, with a revaluation of 17.4% in 2025. Boeing’s stock market journey was able to overcome the first accident of the 737 MAX in 2018, reaching all-time highs in March 2019 at $440, but it could no longer overcome the second fatal incident.
The balance sheet of the American company is still buried in losses: 4,496 million dollars of negative operating result (about 3,860 million euros) as of September, from the 6,937 million dollars in the red (5,960 million euros) a year ago. The main burden is no longer due to the inability to deliver the B737 MAX on time but to the delays in the 777X program. Despite the expectations of a premiere in 2020, the first takeoff is not expected until at least 2027. Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic, Airbus reports an operating result of 3,365 million as of September, with an increase of 25% compared to the first nine months of 2024.
The American company had already just closed the worst financial year in its history in 2024, with losses of 11,875 million dollars, exceeding the 11,870 million in 2020, when it agonized over the pandemic and the consecutive 737MAX accidents. Boeing even required assisted breathing, in October of last year, with a capital increase of $24 billion to stabilize the course. He also cut staff by 10% and changed CEO. Airbus was doing well: it declared a positive net result of 4,232 million in 2024. Now it seeks to prevent a crisis from settling in its factories.
In addition to the accidents before the pandemic, Boeing made the news again last year for the loss of a fuselage panel of an Alaska Airlines plane and, much worse, in June 2025 for the fall to the ground of an Air India 787 Dremaliner. The latter left 240 dead near the Ahmedabad airport, in western India.
High pressure
Beyond issues that affect the most important thing, flight safety, Boeing and Airbus operate under severe stress in their factories. In the midst of an explosion in demand for aircraft, they still suffer from the weakening of the supply chain due to the impact of Covid-19. Such was the impact that Airbus launched a million-dollar financing program so that its suppliers could survive the lack of activity during the pandemic and rearm themselves once they were able to resume activity. To this situation, until then unknown, were added the increase in the price of basic materials and energy costs, derived from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, or the tariff war maintained throughout this year by the Trump Administration.
Consulting firm Oliver Wyman estimates that delays in aircraft delivery affected a record 17,000 units worldwide in 2024, which has forced airlines to review their route growth and fleet renewal plans. The number of annual orders was around 13,000 aircraft per year between 2010 and 2019, which gives an idea of a snowball that grows bigger year after year. As a result of delays in the supply chain. A report by the aforementioned Oliver Wyman published in mid-October reveals that the average delivery time for orders rose to 6.8 years in 2024, compared to 4.5 years in 2018, which entails heavy costs for airlines. There are 4,200 million dollars (about 3,606 million euros) additional due to the extra fuel consumption of older aircraft; 3.1 billion dollars more than expected in the fleet maintenance bill; 2.6 billion dollars for the rental of engines while the new planes arrive, and 1.4 billion for the surplus of spare parts in inventories.
The two largest manufacturers, Airbus and Boeing, have among their objectives to increase the rate of aircraft departure from their factories. The main airlines are lining up with multimillion-dollar orders and there are even some like Ryanair, which blames its supplier Boeing for not being able to meet its growth plans due to a lack of aircraft. The CEO of the American company, Robert Kelly Ortberg has reiterated the focus on the “safety and quality” of the B737 product and has an agreement with the US Civil Aviation regulator (FAA) to increase the production rate of the model from the current limit of 38 to 42 units per month.
It was November 2023 when the then president of Airbus Spain, Alberto Gutiérrez, already warned a group of journalists of what was coming: “The industry cannot cope with the demand for aircraft,” he said, and threw a dart at the eternal adversary based in Arlington (Virginia, USA), “those who can wait, prefer Airbus.”
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