Three passengers who were on a JetBlue Airbus A320 airplane that suddenly experienced an “uncommanded loss of altitude” due to a suspected fault with the flight control system are now suing Airbus for allowing an “unreasonably dangerous” glitch in the autopilot system to go unchecked.
The software glitch led to an emergency worldwide recall in late November, which resulted in an estimated 6,000 Airbus A320 series aircraft needing urgent remedial work before they were allowed to fly again.
While Airbus initially said that intense solar radiation could be behind the software glitch, the passengers question whether this was really the case, and accuse JetBlue of having been aware of a recurring issue with the autopilot system before the accident.
Nadia Ramos, Ricardo Racines, and Natividad Martinez were passengers on JetBlue flight 1230 from Cancún, Mexico, to Newark on October 30, 2025.
The flight departed Cancún International Airport at around midday for what should have been a routine three-hour flight to New Jersey. Around an hour into the flight, as the 21-year-old Airbus A320 (registration: N605JB) was flying over the Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America), “suddenly and unexpectedly pitched nose down resulting in a sudden and un-commanded loss of altitude.”
According to an NTSB preliminary report, 18 passengers and four flight attendants sustained minor injuries after the plane plummeted approximately 100 feet, resulting in the pilots declaring an emergency and diverting to Tampa, where the plane was met by medical first responders.
JetBlue started to investigate what caused the sudden pitch-down movement, given that the autopilot system was engaged throughout. Experts from Airbus were called in, and around a month later, a potential cause had been established.
On November 28, 2025, Airbus issued an urgent alert to operators of Airbus A320 series aircraft, warning that intense solar radiation could corrupt critical data in the Elevator & Aileron Computer (ELAC), which is meant to ensure that the elevators and ailerons operate smoothly and correctly.
The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) then issued an Alert Operators Transmission (AOT) to ensure that airlines implemented a software patch before allowing affected planes to fly again.
That software patch was, in fact, a software rollback, as Airbus identified that the risk of solar radiation affecting the ELAC system was specific to the most recent software update known as L104. Operators who had already installed this software update simply had to roll back the software to the last stable version.
But in their lawsuit, filed last month in a Tampa district court, Ramos, Racines, and Martinez claim that solar radiation was never mentioned as a cause of the uncommanded pitch down movement by either EASA in their operators’ alert or in a preliminary report released by the French BEA aviation accident bureau.
They accuse Airbus and the ELAC manufacturer Thales of negligence in failing to properly test the ELAC system, saying the software was “defective in its design” and was “unreasonably dangerous.”
Ramos, Racines, and Martinez claim they sustained significant injuries in the accident and are suing Airbus and Thales for negligence and strict products liability. They are also suing JetBlue under the Montreal Convention, which makes airlines liable for injuries sustained during the course of an international flight.
Although the plaintiffs have not stated a compensation amount, they believe their claim is in excess of $75,000. Airbus, Thales, and JetBlue have yet to respond to the lawsuit.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is still investigating the cause of the accident and has not yet published its final report on the incident.
The lawsuit has been filed in the Tampa district court and is listed as Ramos v. JetBlue Airways Corporation (8:26-cv-00048).
