A sky-high mystery, did a meteorite strike this passenger jet?
The windscreen of a passenger jet shattered in flight on Thursday. What caused it?
A passenger flight had to make an emergency landing in Utah on Thursday after one of the aircraft's windscreens shattered at cruising altitude, possibly due to some sort of impact damage.
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Damaged plane diverts to Utah
United Airlines 1093 from Denver to Los Angeles encountered the incident in the pre-dawn hours on Oct. 16 while flying at 36,000 feet (10,973 metres) over the town of Moab, Utah.
The flight then diverted to Salt Lake City, where a replacement aircraft ferried the passengers to their destination.
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) confirmed on Saturday that the flight suffered a cracked windscreen, and that the agency had taken possession of the part for examination.
Numerous photos circulating on social media reportedly show shattered glass on the control panels and minor injuries to the captain’s right arm.
Additional photographs, purportedly of the affected aircraft, seem to show impact damage to the corner of the windscreen along with scrapemarks on the window frame and the adjacent skin.
What could cause that kind of damage?
If the damage to the aircraft is indeed from a high-altitude impact of some sort, what kind of object could an airplane encounter at more than 10,000 metres?
Only a handful of birds are able to fly higher than 8,000 metres, and none of them are native to North America.
Hail is a common cause of aircraft damage. But Flight 1093 encountered crystal clear skies as it flew over Utah on Oct. 16. The satellite image used in the graphic at the top of this article was taken a few hours after the incident, showing no active weather along or near the flight route.
The possibilities—and probabilities—grow slimmer from there.
Weather balloons routinely fly that high. These balloons carry instrument packs known as radiosondes that capture important data as they ascend through the atmosphere. Colliding with these small devices could damage an aircraft at cruising speed. However, there were no official weather balloon releases in the area on the morning of Oct. 16.
There’s also the exceptionally slim chance that the aircraft encountered a meteorite or space debris reentering Earth’s atmosphere. While the odds of such a collision would be tremendous, stranger things have happened.
NTSB investigations into incidents like this can take one to two years to complete depending on the complexity of the situation, though preliminary reports are often issued much sooner.
Header image courtesy of Unsplash. For illustrative purposes only.