Airbus has identified a quality issue with metal panels on hundreds of its bestselling A320 family of aircraft, a fresh setback days after the company warned that thousands of the jets required an urgent software fix.
The European plane maker said Monday that it was inspecting jets that may be affected by what it described as a “supplier-quality issue”—a discovery that threatens to upend an already high-pressure scramble to meet full-year delivery targets.
Airbus hasn’t publicly disclosed the number of planes that may be affected, but told customers late last week as many as 628 jets could have defective panels installed, according to a confidential presentation reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Of those, 168 are in-service, while another 245 are in final assembly and being readied for delivery, Airbus engineers noted in the presentation. A further 215 are moving through earlier stages of production.
The issue at hand is the thickness of five specific panels that sit on top of the cockpit and either side of the jet’s right and left front doors. The defects were introduced during the stretching and milling process used to manufacture the panels, leaving some with patches that either exceed or fall short of thickness requirements, according to the presentation.
The affected parts were produced by Spain’s Sofitec Aerospace, which didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Sofitec isn’t the sole supplier of the components for the A320 family.
The manufacturing fault has now been rectified and all newly produced panels conform to requirements, an Airbus spokesman said Monday.
In its presentation, Airbus said tests on jets that had yet to leave its factories had found no safety concerns. For those already in service, the company told operators that there was a potential, “unlikely” risk of a rapid decompression event, but only on aircraft with overly thin panels that might have been thinned further during unrelated repair work. Without checks, that risk “cannot be excluded,” it said.
Airbus has assessed that the likelihood of a safety issue was too slim to warrant any emergency action, according to people familiar with the matter.
The panel problem does, however, threaten to interrupt an end-of-year scramble to meet the company’s annual production target. Airbus is staring at a monster December run of deliveries to meet a goal of delivering some 820 aircraft in 2025.
Airbus needs to deliver more than 160 jets in the next few weeks to hit the target, according to analyst estimates. Most of those planes will now need to be checked to ensure panels meet thickness requirements, a process that can take hours per aircraft, according to people familiar with the process. That could risk delivery delays if sections need to be replaced.
Analysts at Vertical Research Partners said they now expected Airbus to fall 30 jets short of its forecast.
Airbus shares fell as much as 10% in European trading Monday before closing down almost 6%. The panel issue was earlier reported by Reuters.
The aerospace sector has been on high alert for potential quality issues after Boeing’s yearslong battle to overcome a run of production challenges. Airbus customers have also been dealing with ongoing delivery delays along with a large-scale metal contamination problem on engines manufactured for the latest generation A320neo family.
The panel issue is the latest in a run of frustrations for Airbus and its customers, including an urgent warning issued Friday about a problem with cockpit software on its A320 jets that could cause the model to pitch downward during a solar-radiation event.
In response, regulators issued an emergency directive to update the software, which led to cancellations and delays at airlines across the globe over the weekend. Fixes were required on about 6,000 aircraft—or more than half of the in-service fleet—before their next flight.
Airbus said earlier Monday that the fix had been made on all but fewer than 100. The remaining jets require an additional hardware change to enable the software upgrade.
The A320 family of aircraft is by far Airbus’s most important and bestselling aircraft, which has for decades competed head-on with Boeing’s 737 models. The narrow-body jet has helped the company surge past Boeing in recent years to take the crown of world’s biggest plane maker.
Since the pandemic, Airbus has been battling to rapidly increase output of the aircraft from its factories and fully capitalize on an order book of more than 7,100 of the planes.
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