Passengers on a New Jersey-bound plane were in for a fright when the aircraft suddenly plunged thousands of feet. The incident happened in October and sent 15 people to the hospital. Now, officials have a likely cause, and it’s out of this world, quite literally.
Videos by Suggest
Space experts believe cosmic rays from a star in another galaxy struck the plane, causing the aircraft to fail. Speaking with space.com, Clive Dyer, a space and radiation expert from the University of Surrey, explained what he thinks happened. He believes high-energy particles caused by a supernova hit the JetBlue Airbus A320.
Plane Plunges From Sky
The flight had been headed to Newark from Cancun. That’s when it suddenly started to fall out of the sky.
“[Cosmic rays] can interact with modern microelectronics and change the state of a circuit,” Dyer said. “They can cause a simple bit flip, like a 0 to 1 or 1 to 0. They can mess up information and make things go wrong. But they can cause hardware failures too, when they induce a current in an electronic device and burn it out.”
Fortunately, the pilots managed to gain control and landed safely in Tampa. But around 20 people suffered injuries due to the random dropping. Air Industry officials blame intense solar radiation for causing a glitch in the plane’s navigation computer. However, Dyer believes that solar radiation levels were high enough to cause this to happen. Instead, he believes it was a supernova blast from another galaxy.
These particles likely caused the malfunction. However, Dyer says that it is up to manufacturers to create equipment that won’t fail.
“It’s down to manufacturers to produce hardy electronics, especially in safety-critical units,” Dyer said. “AÂ slight problem is that over 20 years, they’ve become complacent, because there have not been any [significant solar weather] events.”
Despite Dyer’s opinions, he said the investigation didn’t find a definite cause for the plane to plunge.
“They never got to the fundamental cause of the bit flip in the device,” Dyer said. “It was left open, surprisingly.”
However, Dyer warns that threats from space can have an affect on a plane.
“You can get huge increases [in particle radiation] from the sun,” said Dyer. “A thousand times higher than cosmic rays, and then many aircraft could be bothered by it.”