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Display Failure Aboard Airbus: Now What?


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Contact photographer Paul Carlotti

What: Air Canada Airbus A319-100 en route from Toronto to Winnipeg
Where: Sault Ste Marie
When: Mar 8 2011
Who: 125 aboard
Why: While en route, the plane was over Canada when the displays quit. The loss of the displays is being attributed to an electronic power failure. (Wonder if there was a short or if it was something else?) The displays were only offline for less than a minute, and subsequently began flashing error messages. Pilots continued on to Winnipeg and managed to land safely. The plane was taken out of commission in order to have an Airbus inspection to determine what exactly was going on.

Flying an Airbus without electronic displays is, I think, tantamount to suicide. I am surprised they didn’t divert somewhere and land immediately. Is it not somewhat risky to continue flying an airbus when the display connections are flakey? This same sort of thing happened on a BMI Airbus A321. Apparently catastrophic failure in rough conditions is not unheard of. In fact, rough conditions are not required to cause the need for a reboot. The term for “rebooting” an airbus that has lost its electronics is called “recycling,” a common enough thing that there is recognizable pilot humor regarding it.

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