It was a weather balloon, not space debris, that struck a United Airlines plane (12 points, 1 day ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45652120
United MAX Hit by Falling Object at 36,000 Feet (402 points, 3 days ago, 225 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45636285
Did Space Debris Hit A United Flight Over The Rockies Thursday? (36 points, 3 days ago, 56 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45633191
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Kind of crazy that even a lightweight object like a weather balloon imparts enough force to crack open a cockpit window. The 30,000-40,000 ft range is pretty heavily occupied by commercial airliners so having AI weather balloons floating around at those altitudes in a flight path seems pretty risky without real-time coordination with air traffic control.
Imagine if this happened at night, or in a thunderstorm or fog etc where they couldn't immediately land safely, might have been a lot worse.
It was just a weather balloon. Non-zero chance these things happen.
randycupertino•3mo ago
> WindBorne Systems, a Palo Alto startup that uses atmospheric balloons to collect weather data for AI-based forecast models, has come forward to say that they believe they may be responsible for the object that hit the windshield.
> “Yes, I think this was a WindBorne balloon. We learned about UA1093 and the potential that it was related to one of our balloons at 11pm PT on Sunday and immediately looked into it,” WindBorne CEO John Dean posted on social media. “At 6am PT, we sent our preliminary investigation to both NTSB and FAA, and are working with both of them to investigate further.”