A new report shows global air‑travel demand continues to hold up in late 2025, with October’s traffic rising 6.6 % year‑on‑year compared with 2024, supported by robust international demand and rising load factors — a trend prompting airlines to increase capacity heading into the holiday season. 

Airbus chief Guillaume Faury has highlighted the huge international effort in recent days to check thousands of A320-family aircraft around the world for potential flight-control software malfunction. "We have been very busy over the weekend with our airline customers [and] regulators," Faury said at a conference held by the Aerospace, Security and Defence Industries Association of Europe (ASD) on 2 December. "I want to commend the EASA leadership in this situation. We have to stay very humble, because it was a safety concern. We had to deal with it." On 28 November, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) issued an emergency airworthiness directive (AD) mandating operators of A319s, A320s and A321s to immediately roll back a software update for the aircraft's elevator aileron computer and revert to a previous configuration, because the update was found to be susceptible to potential malfunction in locations with intense solar radiation. Faury cites an incident with a JetBlue A320, in which that aircraft pitched down at altitude, as the prompt for EASA's directive. The European AD was followed by similar action by the US Federal Aviation Administration. Airbus estimates that 6,000 A320-family aircraft were affected by the ADs. "The decision [to intervene] and the way that was executed was probably better than expected, thanks to the mobilisation of a lot of people around the world in a few days," Faury acknowledges. The event was a reminder that "planes flying in the air are something we have to be very mindful of, and that safety is a day-to-day, minute-by-minute concern," he says. "There's probably a lot of learnings that we need to take from this event. Safety has been managed, that was the top priority. I just like to stay very humble with that situation. We don't want to face those situations again."

Airbus has identified a quality issue with metal panels on a limited number of A320 family aircraft. "As it always does when faced with quality issues in its supply chain, Airbus is taking a conservative approach and is inspecting all aircraft potentially impacted – knowing that only a portion of them will need further action to be taken," "The source of the issue has been identified, contained and all newly produced panels conform to all requirements." Airbus did not say how many aircraft were affected, however Reuters reports that around 50 jets were affected, including some that have yet to be delivered. The confirmation comes days after the European Aviation Safety Agency on 28 November grounded thousands of A320-family aircraft for implementation of an urgent software change to their elevator aileron computers. As of 1 December, the number of aircraft affected by that grounding was less than 100, with those expected to be released back to service once software updates were implemented.