Challenger disaster and Boeing 757
I've been reading a bit into the Challenger disaster recently, we all know the bullet points of course.
A TV documentary a few years ago claimed that a Boeing 757 overflew Cape Kennedy about half an hour before the launch, and had a short but unpleasant encounter with a layer of wind (referred, I suspect incorrectly given the latitude, by the documentary as a jetstream) about 300kph, which would be about 160 knots in real money. The documentary claimed, with some reasonable arguments, that this was what finally precipitated the disaster, the O-ring seals not having catastrophically failed at either launch or max-Q as might have been more likely expected.
First I'd come across that particular snippet, and I can't see anything about it in various books I've got at home or websites I've gone through. The Rogers Commission report describes "wind shear" higher than usual but within design limits, but not where that information came from.
The documentary had claimed that this wasn't observed by NASA sonde balloons because they'd drifted 40odd miles away, which in the conditions of the day doesn't seem particularly unlikely.
Does anybody know anything specific about those wind observations, what airline it was, whether they reported it whilst still airborne, or anything else about it really?
G