The Airbus A320 alert exposes something every CTO should revisit

The Airbus A320 alert exposes something every CTO should revisit

Last Friday, Airbus issued one of the largest safety directives in its 55-year history: 6,000 aircraft from the A320 family needed immediate software correction.

The cause? Intense solar radiation can corrupt critical flight control data.

The trigger was an incident in October, when a JetBlue flight suddenly dove and made an emergency landing in Tampa, injuring 15 passengers.

It wasn't lack of testing

It wasn't lack of testing. It wasn't poorly written code. It was a scenario no one anticipated until it manifested in practice.

At Voidr, we monitor critical systems in production every day. And a pattern repeats: the most serious incidents never come from what you tested — they come from what you dismissed as "too unlikely".

The problem isn't technical — it's framing

We treat edge cases as dispensable exceptions. But in systems that scale, the unlikely becomes inevitable. The question isn't "if", it's "when".

→ A million requests per day with a 0.01% error rate? That's 100 daily failures. → Operating in 50 geographies with climate variations? Someone will operate at the extreme. → Hundreds of enterprise clients? Someone will use your product in ways you never anticipated.

The math is relentless: the greater the scale, the smaller the distance between "edge case" and "incident waiting to happen".

What Airbus got right

→ Recognized the risk when identified → Issued immediate alert → Prioritized correction over reputation → Absorbed the operational cost of doing the right thing — even during one of the busiest travel weekends of the year

What this means for critical software

Before filing something as an "edge case" in the backlog, ask your team: "If this happens in production at 3 AM, how much does it cost?"

If the answer involves revenue, compliance, or sensitive data, it's not an edge case — it's untreated risk.

Do your chaos engineering tests include absurd scenarios? They should. Because "absurd" is subjective when you operate at scale.

What is the "solar radiation" of your system?

That scenario your team jokes about saying "it'll never happen", but no one actually tested?

It's time to revisit.