Did Space Debris Hit A United Flight Over The Rockies Thursday?

https://viewfromthewing.com/did-space-debris-hit-a-united-flight-over-the-rockies-thursday-heres-what-we-know-so-far/

by sipofwater • 9 months ago

36 55 9 months ago

viewfromthewing.com

TruffleLabs• 9 months ago

More info here

https://viewfromthewing.com/united-captain-says-his-plane-wa...

dflock• 9 months ago

Interesting! There are ~2 starlink satellites re-entering the atmosphere _every day_ now - and this is only set to increase. I wonder if this was caused by starlink debris?

imglorp2• 9 months ago

The starlink satellites are designed to burn up in the atmosphere. They do this pretty often. But there's plenty of other space junk that's not designed to burn up and should have shown up on radar.

CaptainOfCoit5• 9 months ago

And the Titanic was designed to not sink, sometimes reality is harsh. What is the probability for any of the parts of a starlink satallite to survive a descent?

Rebelgecko• 9 months ago

I haven't read the latest version of their ODAR (orbital debris assessment), but earlier versions of the satellites had a couple pounds of material that wasn't expected to burn up

notacoward2• 9 months ago

The starlink satellites are designed to burn up in the atmosphere.

How high in the atmosphere, though? They're not likely to hit the ground, sure, but 36,000 feet isn't the ground. Second, designs fail. 432 Park was designed not to have cracking and spalling concrete, yet NYT has a story today about exactly those things. Third, people lie about designs and capabilities. Pretty sure anyone who has ever worked in computing (especially with VC involved) has seen that. Who made that claim, and did they ever back it up?

I'm not saying that Starlink is the culprit here. The evidence is thin. OTOH the possibility can't just be dismissed because of a claim about a design to prevent a similar (but not identical) thing.

behringer• 9 months ago

Are they designed to be completely burned up by the time they reach 38,000 feet above the ground?

avs733• 9 months ago

1) if this was big enough to get picked up on a 737 radar I think we would be having a very different conversation...

2) even if it did... rentry velocity is like miles per second, that would give you on the order of single digit seconds to recognize something on an intersecting trajectory and take action...

3) even then, I would bet that an object on this trajectory and speed would get filtered out as noise by aircraft radar because it is so antithetical to the types of things an airliner needs to inform pilots of.

gortok• 9 months ago

Two events each having a low probability is not the same thing as the events not happening. Despite our best efforts, folks still win the lottery, and you’re more likely to get struck by lightning than win the powerball jackpot.

So while it can be extremely unlikely from a probability standpoint that this plane was stuck by space debris, and it can also be extremely unlikely that he saw it before it hit, it’s not a false statement just because the probability says it’s unlikely.

And of course, despite probability, folks still get struck by lightning.

pxeger1• 9 months ago

folks still win the lottery, and you’re more likely to get struck by lightning than win the powerball jackpot

I'm more likely to get struck by lightning than win the lottery, sure. But it's much more likely that someone wins the lottery this week (~100% in fact) than that someone gets struck by lightning this week.

Edit: my point about independence of events still stands, but it turns out people get struck by lightning amazingly often. The chance of someone in the world getting struck by lightning this week seems to be about 99%!

0101010101014• 9 months ago

it's much more likely that someone wins the lottery this week (~100% in fact) than that someone gets struck by lightning this week

No it isn’t? Not only are the individual odds of winning the lottery lower than the individual odds of being struck by lightning, but far more people are exposed to lightning on a weekly basis than participate in any given lottery.

rzzzt• 9 months ago

Do lottery winners get struck by lightning?

arcanemachiner• 9 months ago

At least once:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/Internationa...

Calavar• 9 months ago

Apparently yes: https://abcnews.go.com/International/canadian-mans-lottery-w...

foofoo122• 9 months ago

folks still win the lottery

Yep, and:

"In 1998, Bill Morgan, an Australian man from Melbourne was captured on film winning a AU$250,000 scratchcard while re-enacting his previous scratchcard win for a news report. The video of the event has since been widely shared online."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Morgan_lottery_win

lukan• 9 months ago

Wow, what a story. Especially with the background what happened to him before winning twice.

"Morgan, a 37-year-old truck driver living in a caravan, was almost killed in a car crash which caused him to develop a heart condition. He then suffered an allergic reaction to the drug used to treat this condition, which triggered a fatal heart attack. He was declared clinically dead for 14 minutes and 38 seconds before being revived by paramedics. He subsequently lapsed into a coma for 12 days, during which his family were advised to turn off his life support. After being transferred to a different hospital, he woke up and made a full recovery."

tzs• 9 months ago

That article could use some work. In the second paragraph after the one that quote is from it says:

His dramatic change in fortune attracted local media attention, and two weeks after his first scratchcard win in May 1999, Nine News asked him to re-enact it for the B-roll footage of their news report. While being filmed scratching off another card inside the shop, he turned around, held up the ticket and said, "I just won 250,000. I'm not joking. I just won 250,000."

1998 was when he suffered a car crash followed by serious medical problems.

CaptainOfCoit5• 9 months ago

So what’s the risk of space debris to aviation? An FAA report from 2023 estimated an annual 0.1% chance that falling space debris would cause a single global aviation casualty. That meant individual passenger risk was less than a trillion‑to‑one though projected to increase.

I wonder if a report done in October 2025 would give a different estimate, considering we have a lot more stuff in space now compared to 2023.

mapmeld• 9 months ago

An annual 0.1% chance of one casualty (so: a passenger jet less than 1 in 1,000 years) doesn't become significantly more likely in two years. Also I assume the FAA actuaries would have forward projections of Starlink launches.

Maybe this is space shuttle math where real-world accidents tell us that the risk is significantly higher. But it'd be the first documented case of a meteor or space debris, so I'd guess it's still unlikely.

CaptainOfCoit5• 9 months ago

An annual 0.1% chance of one casualty (so: a passenger jet less than 1 in 1,000 years) doesn't become significantly more likely in two years

Well, not by itself, but isn't that risk based on how many numbers of objects there are in space? And since we're launching more stuff into space than falls out of it, the numbers used for the calculations may be changing?

Hilift• 9 months ago

I sense an incoming report supporting the space hail theory.

SwiftyBug• 9 months ago

I have a paralyzing phobia of flying. I do, but It's always many hours of sheer terror. In my paranoia, I recently unlocked a new concern about air travel: what if a meteorite hits the plane? That would certainly be catastrophic. And now I've acquired a new one, space debris! Nice.

sorokod• 9 months ago

You could get hit by a meteorite or space debris without flying too.

Not sure if this helps though...

QuiEgo• 9 months ago

You could get hit by a meteorite walking down the street, taking a train, or driving a car too.

There's some degree of things we just can't do anything about. We just have to accept it and move on. There's something about the human condition that makes it easy to say, and hard to do, and harder for some people than others - wishing you luck on your journey.

Focus on what you can control (exercise is a miracle drug that will lower your risk of so many problems! Don't smoke! Use sunscreen!) and enjoy life as best you can.

virgildotcodes• 9 months ago

I know you're trying to help, but genuine phobias don't typically yield to rational deconstruction.

tgv• 9 months ago

I think this shows a hit by a small meteorite or space shrapnel is well survivable. It might even be a thought that can help you cope.

1970-01-01• 9 months ago

Well, this is the first time this has happened in all aviation history, and nobody died.

lsllc• 9 months ago

When TWA Flight 800 went down over Long Island in 1996, there were at the time multiple witness statements of a "streak of light" which had been reported (and later discounted by the investigation) as a possible missile.

Although the odds are incredibly slim, I wondered around the time if it could have actually been a meteorite striking the aircraft, passing through the fuel tank and causing the explosion. Presumably it would have been moving very quickly, might have looked like a missile to an observer, and wouldn't have left any shrapnel debris/marks in the wreckage.

I would imagine that the space debris mentioned in the article would be a lot less dense and moving much more slowly (relatively speaking) than a meteorite at the impact with the aircraft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_800

M95D• 9 months ago

Captain's arm was injured by debris, but no decompression? How did they get past the windshield? Also, those scratchs look days old. Not a drop of blood visible.

Smells like fake news.

serial_dev2• 9 months ago

To me, the scratches could be new or a couple of hours old. They look like superficial scratches and cuts, they can heal quickly when the person is healthy.

the_duke• 9 months ago

For a potential pilot (username), you are jumping to odd conclusions here...

* This looks relatively convincing.

https://avherald.com/h?article=52e80701

https://x.com/oeingoboeing/status/1979588783982133360

* They obviously would have cleaned up the wounds... this can be a few hours old , surface wounds build crusts quickly

sml156• 9 months ago

I am more concerned with the way the left window is held on using a big paperclip

AnimalMuppet• 9 months ago

Why divert to SLC from there? Looks like Las Vegas was at least as close.

Would the elevation of the airport matter (for air pressure on that cracked windshield)? Did they pick SLC because it's higher?

sipofwater• 9 months ago

"Something from “space” may have just struck a United Airlines flight over Utah" "“NTSB gathering radar, weather, flight recorder data.”": https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/10/something-from-space-m... (arstechnica.com/space/2025/10/something-from-space-may-have-just-struck-a-united-airlines-flight-over-utah/)

Did Space Debris Hit A United Flight Over The Rockies Thursday?

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