On October 16, United Airlines Flight 1093, a Boeing 737 Max 8, was cruising at 30,000 feet on the way to Los Angeles from Denver when it was struck by something while flying above Moab, Utah. No one knows what it was. The pilot reportedly described it as “space debris.”
The space… thing cracked the upper-right corner of the cockpit windshield, breaking only one of the laminated sandwiched-layered panes. No official injuries were reported, though images floating around online suggest a pilot may have suffered some minor cuts.
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating. They’re analyzing the wrecked windshield in their lab and combing through radar, weather data, and flight recorder info. The working theory from unnamed sources who spoke with the aviation news site AvBreif.com suggests that the object may have been a rogue weather balloon payload.
Other theories include a meteorite and a possible bird strike, though birds don’t usually fly that high.
Space junk is another viable and realistic possibility. We’ve been polluting the Earth’s orbit with satellites for a while now. It seems every month there’s a new story of some small or huge chunk of space debris plummeting to the Earth.
United Flight Hit With Mystery Object at 36,000 Feet
Until the investigations land on a more concrete explanation, all we are stuck with our theories. One thing that is clear at the moment is that whatever it was, it was much tougher and traveling faster than your average bird would, especially at that altitude.
Passenger Heather Ramsey spoke with FOX 11 about what it was like on the plane during the moment of impact.
“One flight attendant raised her voice and told the other, ‘Get back. Get to the back of the aircraft, stop service,’” Ramsey stated.
“I was just looking out the window thinking, ‘We could go down at any time.’ It was really scary,” she continued. “We were all holding our breath until the very end. You could definitely feel the tension on the entire aircraft.”
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