A weather balloon may have cracked the windshield of a United Airlines flight last week, forcing it to divert to Salt Lake City, a weather balloon company said. Transportation officials said they were investigating the incident.
United Flight 1093 was en route to Los Angeles from Denver on Thursday when it diverted about an hour and a half into its flight and landed safely in Salt Lake City instead, according to data from FlightAware, a flight tracking site.
United said the plane had diverted “to address damage to its multilayered windshield,” without specifying what had damaged the windshield. But a California-based weather balloon company, WindBorne Systems, said one of its balloons may have been involved.
“Looking at the data, I personally believe it’s quite likely that it was a WindBorne balloon,” said John Dean, the company’s chief executive and co-founder. He noted that the final decision would lie with the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration, which did not respond to requests for comment. The board confirmed on social media that it was investigating the incident.
Reuters reported on Tuesday that Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the N.T.S.B., said that a weather balloon might have been responsible for the incident and that “in the wrong situation could have been really devastating for the aircraft and those on board.”
WindBorne Systems, which operates “long duration weather balloons” that collect data that is then sold to government agencies, announced in a statement posted online on Monday that it was working with both the N.T.S.B. and the F.A.A. to investigate the incident.
“We are grateful that to our knowledge there were no serious injuries and no loss of pressurization,” the company said in a statement.
The flight had 134 passengers on board and six crew members, according to United Airlines. . In a statement, the company said it “arranged for another aircraft to take customers to Los Angeles later that day,” and noted that its maintenance crew was “working to return the aircraft to service.”
Mr. Dean, the chief executive and co-founder of WindBorne, said in an interview on Tuesday that the six-year-old company had launched nearly 5,000 balloons over its tenure, but if its balloon caused the crack, then it was the first time that such an incident has happened.
“Being an operator of a platform in the sky, we think about airspace safety quite a bit, and I take it super seriously,” he said, noting that the company had immediately pushed software changes and increased human oversight of the balloon in response to the incident.
“From the data that we have,” Mr. Dean said, “it’s a very unlikely incident to happen in the first place.”
Aimee Ortiz covers breaking news and other topics.
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