Airliners and Meteorites

[linuxgal]

Last year I witnessed a spectacular daytime meteorite over Lesotho that left a trail of smoke that quickly formed a cloud around it. The cloud proved to be about 120nm away and about 5000ft above our cruising altitude of FL350. If I'd been going to East London instead of Port Elizabeth that day, at FL390, we could conceivably have been taken out by this bundle of rocks. The recovered material of the meteorite (I reported the sighting and kept track of the story) totalled 40kg.

Last week Thursday, we saw another spectacular one at night returning to Joburg, and shortly thereafter a northbound Virgin was being called and called by Joburg, but fortunately turned out to have simply been not listening out...

The only people that seem to be interested in the chances of a meteorite striking an aircraft are the statisticians and conspiracy theorists. Has anyone else had a close encounter of the rocky kind?

[OzExpat]

I'm guessing that a meteorite travels a helluva lot quicker than the average aircraft, so a strike could ruin yer whole day. But, having said that, I reckon you'd havta be real unlucky to get hit. I'm not aware of any reports or statistics on "close encounters" either.

The way I figure it, there's more chance of one taking out a GPS satellite, but that hasn't happened either... yet. Does anyone know of any studies that have been done on this? Gotta say that it isn't something that I've ever thought about while flying.

[linuxgal]

As a clue to speed, the locals who were on the ground in the fall area in Lesotho for the one I saw heard sonic booms. Estimates are that 3000 meteorites a year fall to earth. Some weigh grams, others tons. Even a gram at the speed of sound would ruin your day... Airlne pilots are in a prime position to see meteorites and I'm interested to know how many of us have seen them close by.

[lomapaseo]

There was lots of discussion on this at the time of TWA800 investigation

Most agreed it was a very small chance to encounter one and of course there was no evidence of craters in the top of the fuselage.

Regarding the discussion about the speed of sound above.. I guess you would need to convert this discussion to one of actual velocity in order to make judgements. Then one needs to estmate the most likely particle size moving at this velocity.

It's easy to speculate on what if's but a lot more practical to speculate on at least the more likely scenarios that haven't happened yet (or have they)