Colombian carrier Avianca must perform software “downgrades” on roughly two dozen remaining Airbus A320-family aircraft as it works to fully resolve a vulnerability issue by 3 December.
Abra Group chief executive Adrian Neuhauser, speaking during member carrier Avianca’s 2 December earnings call, explained how the Bogota-based airline grappled with the global grounding of Airbus narrowbodies over the weekend.
“Many airlines around the world were recently impacted by Airbus’ requirement over the last weekend to update – and by update, it’s actually downgrade – the software on the elevator-control computers,” Neuhauser says. “As a result of that, we were very significantly impacted in terms of our fleet.”
The carrier operates about 100 A320-family jets, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium, and had particularly high exposure to the software issue requiring modification.
“We were one of the airlines, we believe, in the world with the highest compliance in upgrading to the latest [software] version; we were almost 92% upgraded,” he adds. “So we had to go out and downgrade everything. We’re mostly through that, and we should be done between today and tomorrow.”
The fixes involved a “relatively simple” software modification, he says, adding that Avianca has one of roughly two dozen facilities globally authorised to make required changes.
“The vast majority of the fleet work was done by the end of the weekend,” Neuhauser says.
Flight-tracking platform FlightAware shows that Avianca has cancelled about 275 flights since 29 November, including about 60 on 2 December.
However, Neuhauser says the ”impact of that is not going to be substantial. We think in terms of the net cost, including passenger impact… We believe it’s somewhere between the high single-digits and low tens of total margin impact”.
The total financial impact of the aircraft groundings remains to be seen, as Avianca shut down ticket sales through 8 December “the moment we heard about this”.
”We didn’t know how much capacity we were going to be able to fly, and… we needed that capacity to be able to recover passengers that were impacted by the significant disruptions of the first few days,” Neuhauser says.
Avianca has restarted ticket sales but needs several days to estimate how much revenue it will recover from the pause.
Elsewhere in the Americas, JetBlue Airways said it expects only a minor impact to its bottom line from the A320 grounding, despite cancelling about 170 flights on 30 November, the USA’s busiest travel day of the year.
American Airlines was also forced to remove hundreds of jets from service to make the software changes.
