Airbus’s preliminary assessment of the Air India Phuket-Delhi A320 event indicates that the aircraft experienced sequential disruption to all three hydraulic systems within a few seconds, temporarily affecting elevator and aileron control for around four seconds. The analysis, drawn from the digital flight data recorder, shows the green system affected first, followed rapidly by the blue and yellow systems. During the brief interval in which the relevant control surfaces were unavailable, the aircraft pitched up, the second autopilot disconnected, and the first officer applied nose-down input that did not immediately produce the expected response. The hydraulic systems then recovered in sequence and normal control authority returned. Twenty-four people were injured. The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau is leading the probe with Airbus requesting detailed maintenance information, pressure-switch and transducer checks, and further structural inspections because load exceedances were recorded.
The technical significance lies in the architecture. An A320’s three independent hydraulic systems are designed so that no single failure should remove primary flight controls. A near-simultaneous loss of all three, even for a few seconds, is therefore an event that must be explained at the level of sensors, valves, wiring, software logic or an external trigger that the data can still not fully identify. Airbus has pointed investigators toward pressure-switch behaviour and has asked for maintenance history. It has not yet stated a definitive root cause. The distinction between an actual loss of hydraulic pressure and a cascade of false low-pressure indications that caused the flight-control computers to remove actuators from service remains open.
The four-second window is decisive for investigators. It frames questions about what the crew observed, how quickly the aircraft responded once pressure or signal integrity returned and whether any structural or system damage resulted from the abrupt pitch change. It also places the human-factors and medical strands of the inquiry, already public, alongside a hard systems anomaly rather than treating the altitude change solely as weather or turbulence. The final report will need to reconcile the recorded sequence with the aircraft’s redundancy design and with the maintenance state of the specific components Airbus has flagged.
Until that work is complete, the public record rests on a narrow but consequential finding. A handful of seconds the normal relationship between pilot input and control-surface movement was interrupted by a multi-system hydraulic anomaly. Explaining how that interruption occurred and how it can be prevented from recurring is now the central technical task facing investigators.