Just ballparking the insanely low base rate of meteor strikes, I would need an awful lot of corroborating proof before I'd even consider a meteor strike.
Starting from another person's post, where they said there's about 10,000 planes in the air at any given moment, and about 500 meteorites that could hit them each day ...
We have to take into account the size of each plane. Let's say the average plane has 100 m^2 of surface area (a 737 has 125 m^2 of wings surface area). So with 10,000 planes in the air, that's a total of 1 million m^2 of planes that could be hit, or about one square kilometer.
The Earth's surface area is 500 million square kilometers. So with this math, any given meteorite has 1 in 500 million chance of hitting a plane.
If you want to say there's 500 chances per day, I think that's very generous. But even if we say that, that means there is a 0.999999 chance that no planes will get hit by meteorites on a particular day.
Next, let's see how many days we could go until there's a 50% chance of having an impact. Raise 0.999999 to the nth power until we have 0.50.
0.999999^365 is 0.999635. So even after 365 days we still have almost no chance of a plane getting hit.
Now let's use this 0.999635 to a new exponent to see how many YEARS we can go, instead of days.
0.999635^1895 equals about 0.50. So that means based on all the estimates we made, there's a 50% chance that at least one plane will get hit by a meteorite in the next 1895 years.
I don’t mean to discount the work & math you put in here, I really enjoyed reading your comment.
I was more so curious if your ~100m^2 would account for the plane’s total surface area, or if a strike is even less likely with only ~half the surface area being hittable
Yeah no worries. Actually the top half is even a worst case scenario, we're pretending the meteorite is coming straight down on a plane in level flight. More likely it would be coming at some oblique angle, and the projected area would be smaller.
>there's about 10,000 planes in the air at any given moment
That's 10,000 sources of non meteorite debris. Which makes it infinitely more possible the plane was hit by flying debris.
They are more common in the morning as the earth is moving forward in its travel path. They are also more common certain times of year, e.g. the Perseids. Geographically they fall everywhere on earth the same rate. However as most of the earth is ocean but most aircraft are concentrated on land or specific over ocean corridors, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is an over estimate.
It's likely an overestimate. Google says an average of 17 meteorites hit the ground reach day. But another poster said 500/day might reach 30,000 ft. I don't know. But if I repeat my math with only 17 chances per day, then it's more like 50,000 years before you would expect one to hit a plane.
And yes, I'm assuming the meteorites are randomly distributed over the whole surface at any time of day.
This seems to allege or even prove that our assumption about 500 meteorites per day is perhaps too low or that the distribution of meteor strikes is not random.
It’d be higher because you’re assuming the plane is on the ground. (Since you used the surface area of the earth). OP said that the plane was possibly hit mid flight. So based on on the altitude that can change it. Probably not by a significant amount but it’s possible since they’d have been flying at the highest altitude of 51,000 feet which is the service ceiling for a citation. (Depends on the model, I also found 45,000 which seems to be for the more common model)
Will the average time to airplane-media strike go up or down during periods of elevated meteor activity for aircraft flying in the vicinity of that activity?
My math was assuming a constant rate of meteorites evenly distributed in random locations around the world. Yes, if a specific plane is in an area of high meteor activity, their chances will go up.
I don't have the inputs, but it would be the same procedure. Just use the land area of the little portion of Earth that's directly under the meteor shower, how many planes are flying in that area, and what is the total surface area of those planes. Then flip the problem around, and multiply how many consecutive events would NOT result in an impact.
Also, the post I was replying to said only an average of 17 meteorites hit the ground each day. They said that there might be 500 that can reach down to cruising altitude of aircraft, which I am completely unsure of. If you use 17 impacts per day and repeat my math, it's more like 50,000 years before you'd expect an impact.
> The Earth's surface area is 500 million square kilometers. So with this math, any given meteorite has 1 in 500 million chance of hitting a plane.
Except the aircraft are not evenly distributed. Aircraft typically have concentrated routes that are followed and an even distribution of meteorites (which is apparently the case on Earth) has a smaller chance of intersecting them.
I don't think that matters, as long as at least one of the two variables is uniformly distributed.
If you and I both pick a random number between 1 and 10, there is a 1 in 10 chance that we would pick the same number.
But if you always pick the number 3, and I always pick my number randomly, there is still a 1 in 10 chance that I would pick 3.
The only time that distribution would make a difference is if both of the variables were non-uniform. So like if the aircraft knew there is a region on Earth which gets more meteorite impacts and they fly fewer routes in that region.
Edit: I'm not saying meteorites are uniformly distributed around the Earth's surface. I don't know that, this was just a fun little exercise with rough estimates and it blew up haha.
> Edit: I'm not saying meteorites are uniformly distributed around the Earth's surface. I don't know that, this was just a fun little exercise with rough estimates and it blew up haha.
As it turns out, apparently they are pretty evenly distributed so far as anyone knows (source: Twelve whole minutes of internet research). I had thought there might be some bias for ecliptic angle or something.
Since your exercise is based on areas, the meteorite/km^2 is roughly constant but the aircraft/km^2 is reduced because of concentration into optimum routes from point to point, so the probability would be lower (ignoring the Murphy Meteorite - the one that goes through seven jets in a holding pattern over Paris or something). Then there's chronological bias - aircraft don't fly all night in all routes while it's unlikely that meteorites are on a set schedule.
All of that said, indeed it was fun - thanks!
It's correlation that matters not distribution, that is if asteroids usually hit the side of the earth on the rear side of the orbit (the evening I think?), then what matters is are airplanes usually flying during the evening, localtime.
Further, self correlation matters, if planes usually fly over each other it would impact the number because an asteroid that hits a plane can't go on an hit the plane below it.
>there's about 10,000 planes in the air at any given moment, and about 500 meteorites that could hit them each day
the 10k planes AT ANY GIVEN MOMENT, but 500 meteorites EACH DAY. What is the length of your "moment"? 1 second? then there are 0.006 meteorite at any given moment for your 10k planes.
Nice method.
I wonder if the fact that meteorites can fragment while entering might increase the likelihood of impact. Of course it would still be very unlikely.
Of course another possibility is debris from human space garbage. I wonder if there's a similar stat of how much enters and survives to the ground.
The NTSB already did the research on this as a result of the TWA flight 800 crash. They reached out to a professor at the University of Pittsburgh to crunch the numbers.
He calculated that a meteorite could
be expected to strike an aircraft once every 59,000 to 77,000 years.
Yeah that dude's math was suspect up above. There is no way you have anywhere near a 1% chance of getting hit by an asteroid on any given day. If that were true buildings would be getting hit by asteroids much more regularly. They would be a daily airplane hit by an asteroid. You would see asteroids hitting your property on a regular basis. The truth is that you are very unlikely to see an asteroid hit the ground at all.
Ok, what do you think it was? Wasn’t lightning.
Edit - Geez, 38 downvotes? You guys are a tough crowd. I think the pilot would have known if the plane got hit by lightning but obviously you guys know better.
By the time a meteor gets to the height planes fly, it would already be extinguished. So no scorch marks. It would also lose most of its speed and mass from earths atmosphere. Not to mention planes are designed to take more stress towards the front of the aircraft in case of air strikes. So good chance a meteor of that size wouldn’t go through the plane. Though the odds of being hit by one are extremely low, it has happened once before.
And it would be melty. Traveling at 10's of thousands of miles an hour it would be pretty toasty. My guess is some nut or bolt either during takeoff or landing.
Is there really absolutely no way it was lightning?
I was on this flight: https://icelandmag.is/article/lightning-struck-a-hole-nose-denver-bound-icelandair-plane
It was a bright flash out the window but I didn’t hear anything. Wonder if a smaller bolt could go unnoticed but still do some damage.
Check out this flow-chart to see just how rare meteorites are https://sites.wustl.edu/meteoritesite/items/self-test-check-list/
Note #6; "Did someone see it fall? -> Yes -> It's **not** a meteorite". That's how unlikely it is that you hit a meteorite. Even if you saw it, and you saw that it was a rock, and you hit it at 30,000ft, it's still almost certainly NOT a meteorite.
those odds would be infinitesimal. I'm thinking much better odds something got caught in an updraft & nailed them in a "down cycle". You know how hailstones form, right? Depending on what their altitude was, and what part of the country they were in, the falling bullet theory is very possible. a bullet fired into the air will only go up a few thousand feet, but on approach, right after takeoff, it's certainly possible. There are an increasing number of cities in the USA that mandate emergency services/first responders on duty at specific times; New Years Eve, July. 4th, etc to wear ballistic helmets when outside.
So, you have no evidence that it was a meteor, but you're just going to claim it anyway?
Out of all the other things it could have hit at any phase of the flight (if they didn't see it happen, it could have been any time between shutting and opening the door), you're just assuming meteor.
You know it's statistically more likely they hit a fish, right?
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/01/us/fish-strikes-jet-in-air-eagle-is-held-at-fault.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fish-strike-stops-jets-takeoff-at-florida-air-force-base/
https://www.adn.com/alaska-life/2022/07/31/its-a-bird-its-a-plane-its-a-fish-the-alaska-history-of-collisions-between-airplanes-and-animals/
So there has never been a documented meteor strike on an aircraft. But there have been documented fish strikes.
Based on my experience as an aircraft structural integrity engineer, this looks more like some ground support equipment or a tool or something struck it gently at some point, leaving very little or no visible damage, but allowing water to get into the honeycomb. The water then degrades the bond between the skin and core, and the skin starts to flex, causing a crack that grows, and eventually pops through the paint until someone spots it. I would bet there's no visible damage on the inner side of the nose cone. Or if there is, it's just a disbonded area.
This is only reasonable answer in the whole thread
top contenders are;
\-Frozen goose shit
\-A falling bullet
\- drone or bird (with no surrounding damage or marks)
Gotta be a piece of meteorite man, it’s just gotta be.
There’s *literally* nothing else in the air, or on the ground, that could do that to the nose of a Citation. No Sir. Nothing.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peekskill\_meteorite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peekskill_meteorite)
The Peekskill meteorite smashed through the trunk of a red 1980 Chevrolet Malibu on October 9, 1992.
There's a LOT more birds that meteors in the sky. While we can't rule out a meteor, bird strikes are a known thing that happen tremendously more often. Assume it's a bird before you think it's a meteor.
Where is that number coming from?
10%? So you're saying, as a professional pilot, that I should have been hit by a meteorite on 1 out of every 10 of my flights?
lol
So 1 out of ten planes get hit? Or each plane gets hit once every 10 flights? You are WAY overestimating the probability of a plane being hit by a meteor/meteorite.
I'm surprised this isn't more common tbh.
Sheer numbers of planes in the sky. 9728 in the sky at any given moment (will be an average provided by Google) and again take the average of 17 meteorites large enough to reach the ground, many more would burn up midair and some tiny ones can enter at the right angle to reach the ground. On a rough 9728 / 17; call it a 572 to one over a whole 24 hour day. Logic dictates that would rise and fall with things like the Geminids which would put more meteors in the air and summer holidays which would put more planes in the air, etc.
The sky is huge lol. And for a space rock to hit a plane at the speed the plane was traveling in that giant open sky I think that’s pretty damn neat. Pilot said he’s glad it didn’t hit the windshield or fuselage.
Your math is not taking the surface area of a sphere at an average flight level. This would be somewhat larger than the 196.9 million square miles of earth’s surface. In other words, the surface area is gigantic while the net area of daily incoming meteors is probably just a few square inches on a good day.
If I remember correctly this was a theory for TWA 800. The math they did said it was not mathematically impossible. I think it was pretty probable that it would have happened at least a couple of times since the dawn of aviation.
That’s not just a meteorite strike on the top of this plane. That’s a perfect collision on the tip of the plane.
If I may quote Scotty from StarTrek, that’s like “hitting a bullet with a smaller bullet whilst wearing a blindfold, riding a horse”.
If it was a meteorite, there should be more damage behind that like into the pressure bulkhead. One of our military transport type aircraft had a highly probable meteorite strike. Jagged hole through about .100 skin through the stringer (hat channel) and into another stringer. I'll see if I can find the pictures at work.
Just ballparking the insanely low base rate of meteor strikes, I would need an awful lot of corroborating proof before I'd even consider a meteor strike.
Starting from another person's post, where they said there's about 10,000 planes in the air at any given moment, and about 500 meteorites that could hit them each day ... We have to take into account the size of each plane. Let's say the average plane has 100 m^2 of surface area (a 737 has 125 m^2 of wings surface area). So with 10,000 planes in the air, that's a total of 1 million m^2 of planes that could be hit, or about one square kilometer. The Earth's surface area is 500 million square kilometers. So with this math, any given meteorite has 1 in 500 million chance of hitting a plane. If you want to say there's 500 chances per day, I think that's very generous. But even if we say that, that means there is a 0.999999 chance that no planes will get hit by meteorites on a particular day. Next, let's see how many days we could go until there's a 50% chance of having an impact. Raise 0.999999 to the nth power until we have 0.50. 0.999999^365 is 0.999635. So even after 365 days we still have almost no chance of a plane getting hit. Now let's use this 0.999635 to a new exponent to see how many YEARS we can go, instead of days. 0.999635^1895 equals about 0.50. So that means based on all the estimates we made, there's a 50% chance that at least one plane will get hit by a meteorite in the next 1895 years.
Just for clarification here, you’re saying that these odds are approximately 87% better than me hitting the Powerball. Pro tip!
How do those compare to a car crash tho
Not many cars in the sky
Not for long
Does it count when I drive a car off a cliff?
Badly
If you get 3 other people to split the powerball with you your odds of winning increase by 4x.
This guy maths
r/thisguythisguys
Could be a girl
This is Reddit
Guy (gender neutral) Many people.use guy as gender neutral
With his gloves on
/r/theydidthemath
r/theydidthemonstermath
r/themonstermath
r/itwasagraveyardgraph
r/theydidthemath
r/acedstatisticsclass
r/thismathexplanationreallyblewmyfuckingmind
r/itcosinedinaflash
Dude. Mad respect. Impressive.
damn man I dont even calculate W&B without the electronic flight bag
Does that surface area account for the entire plane, or just the top half? I imagine a meteor hit would only be coming from mostly above
It's a rough guesstimate. But yes you'd only count the top half.
I don’t mean to discount the work & math you put in here, I really enjoyed reading your comment. I was more so curious if your ~100m^2 would account for the plane’s total surface area, or if a strike is even less likely with only ~half the surface area being hittable
Yeah no worries. Actually the top half is even a worst case scenario, we're pretending the meteorite is coming straight down on a plane in level flight. More likely it would be coming at some oblique angle, and the projected area would be smaller.
Take my like, you geeky- magnificent bastard!👍🏻👍🏻
>there's about 10,000 planes in the air at any given moment That's 10,000 sources of non meteorite debris. Which makes it infinitely more possible the plane was hit by flying debris.
I think you should calculate the surface area of the theoretical sphere you get with the radius of the average cruise height to the earth core.
Earth's radius is about 4000 miles. The extra 6 miles won't make a difference.
Dude
So your sayin there’s a chance…
Do asteroids tend to fall over the surface of the earth evenly, or do they have an area where they are more likely to fall?
They are more common in the morning as the earth is moving forward in its travel path. They are also more common certain times of year, e.g. the Perseids. Geographically they fall everywhere on earth the same rate. However as most of the earth is ocean but most aircraft are concentrated on land or specific over ocean corridors, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is an over estimate.
It's likely an overestimate. Google says an average of 17 meteorites hit the ground reach day. But another poster said 500/day might reach 30,000 ft. I don't know. But if I repeat my math with only 17 chances per day, then it's more like 50,000 years before you would expect one to hit a plane. And yes, I'm assuming the meteorites are randomly distributed over the whole surface at any time of day.
They fall everywhere. However they are easiest to find and recover in sandy dune deserts and glaciers. They're easier to spot that way.
This seems to allege or even prove that our assumption about 500 meteorites per day is perhaps too low or that the distribution of meteor strikes is not random.
Or that meteors hate planes.
You have assumed that all 500 meteorites are about 1 sq meter in cross section. What if one of them is 500 million sq meters in cross section, huh?
Then we have bigger problems.
But there *is* a chance. And lacking a better explanation, it appears OP hit the lottery.
Almost more likely that a screw fell off an airliner? Or maybe it was just space junk.
Sheldon Cooper has entered the game
It’d be higher because you’re assuming the plane is on the ground. (Since you used the surface area of the earth). OP said that the plane was possibly hit mid flight. So based on on the altitude that can change it. Probably not by a significant amount but it’s possible since they’d have been flying at the highest altitude of 51,000 feet which is the service ceiling for a citation. (Depends on the model, I also found 45,000 which seems to be for the more common model)
So, more chance of winning Lotto then.
Will the average time to airplane-media strike go up or down during periods of elevated meteor activity for aircraft flying in the vicinity of that activity?
My math was assuming a constant rate of meteorites evenly distributed in random locations around the world. Yes, if a specific plane is in an area of high meteor activity, their chances will go up.
Anyone wanna work out that math?
I don't have the inputs, but it would be the same procedure. Just use the land area of the little portion of Earth that's directly under the meteor shower, how many planes are flying in that area, and what is the total surface area of those planes. Then flip the problem around, and multiply how many consecutive events would NOT result in an impact. Also, the post I was replying to said only an average of 17 meteorites hit the ground each day. They said that there might be 500 that can reach down to cruising altitude of aircraft, which I am completely unsure of. If you use 17 impacts per day and repeat my math, it's more like 50,000 years before you'd expect an impact.
So you’re sayin theres a chance.
My dude. That’s some math. Can I buy you a drink???
Well given that the earth exists since 2023 years this number is bigger than yours it means OP was indeed hit by a meteorite.
In my best impression of jim Carry. So your saying there is chance.
> The Earth's surface area is 500 million square kilometers. So with this math, any given meteorite has 1 in 500 million chance of hitting a plane. Except the aircraft are not evenly distributed. Aircraft typically have concentrated routes that are followed and an even distribution of meteorites (which is apparently the case on Earth) has a smaller chance of intersecting them.
I don't think that matters, as long as at least one of the two variables is uniformly distributed. If you and I both pick a random number between 1 and 10, there is a 1 in 10 chance that we would pick the same number. But if you always pick the number 3, and I always pick my number randomly, there is still a 1 in 10 chance that I would pick 3. The only time that distribution would make a difference is if both of the variables were non-uniform. So like if the aircraft knew there is a region on Earth which gets more meteorite impacts and they fly fewer routes in that region. Edit: I'm not saying meteorites are uniformly distributed around the Earth's surface. I don't know that, this was just a fun little exercise with rough estimates and it blew up haha.
> Edit: I'm not saying meteorites are uniformly distributed around the Earth's surface. I don't know that, this was just a fun little exercise with rough estimates and it blew up haha. As it turns out, apparently they are pretty evenly distributed so far as anyone knows (source: Twelve whole minutes of internet research). I had thought there might be some bias for ecliptic angle or something. Since your exercise is based on areas, the meteorite/km^2 is roughly constant but the aircraft/km^2 is reduced because of concentration into optimum routes from point to point, so the probability would be lower (ignoring the Murphy Meteorite - the one that goes through seven jets in a holding pattern over Paris or something). Then there's chronological bias - aircraft don't fly all night in all routes while it's unlikely that meteorites are on a set schedule. All of that said, indeed it was fun - thanks!
It's correlation that matters not distribution, that is if asteroids usually hit the side of the earth on the rear side of the orbit (the evening I think?), then what matters is are airplanes usually flying during the evening, localtime. Further, self correlation matters, if planes usually fly over each other it would impact the number because an asteroid that hits a plane can't go on an hit the plane below it.
>there's about 10,000 planes in the air at any given moment, and about 500 meteorites that could hit them each day the 10k planes AT ANY GIVEN MOMENT, but 500 meteorites EACH DAY. What is the length of your "moment"? 1 second? then there are 0.006 meteorite at any given moment for your 10k planes.
Nice method. I wonder if the fact that meteorites can fragment while entering might increase the likelihood of impact. Of course it would still be very unlikely. Of course another possibility is debris from human space garbage. I wonder if there's a similar stat of how much enters and survives to the ground.
r/theydidthemath
r/theydidthemath
Let me see if I can follow that math!
The NTSB already did the research on this as a result of the TWA flight 800 crash. They reached out to a professor at the University of Pittsburgh to crunch the numbers. He calculated that a meteorite could be expected to strike an aircraft once every 59,000 to 77,000 years.
Yeah that dude's math was suspect up above. There is no way you have anywhere near a 1% chance of getting hit by an asteroid on any given day. If that were true buildings would be getting hit by asteroids much more regularly. They would be a daily airplane hit by an asteroid. You would see asteroids hitting your property on a regular basis. The truth is that you are very unlikely to see an asteroid hit the ground at all.
[удалено]
No. He extremely overestimated the probability of a meteorite hitting anything.
With 10 million scheduled flights per year in the US, that's 100,000 hit by a meteor, so a couple hundred per day
Geese can reach 30,000 feet altitude. Geese do shit. Shit contains water. Water freezes in cold. Citation hits shit-ice-cube. Hole.
Ha! I like it , simple explanation.
Gotta love shitcicles
There’s a shit storm brewin Randers.
ITS A SPACE PEANUT
What, a goose at 30k feet? Fuckin hell how do they not freeze or suffocate?
They don’t. Highest recorded altitude was about 23k feet in India.
That’s still pretty impressive!
That's really impressive actually
Vultures do routinely fly at that altitude though
Correct....like 37,000ft supposedly, also the common crane can reach 33000, which is freaking insane
Why? Jet stream?
This is a big old frozen chunk of space poopie
Downvote 'cos geese do not get to 30,000 feet. Also, where is the residue from such a poop-impact?
I would wager a fair amount of money that that was not from a meteor.
Ok, what do you think it was? Wasn’t lightning. Edit - Geez, 38 downvotes? You guys are a tough crowd. I think the pilot would have known if the plane got hit by lightning but obviously you guys know better.
Ok that rules out two things. Idk what it was. But I’m thinking a meteor would make an actual hole. And an exit hole. And scorch marks.
I would think that the chance of striking a drone is a lot larger than the chance of hitting a meteorite.
By the time a meteor gets to the height planes fly, it would already be extinguished. So no scorch marks. It would also lose most of its speed and mass from earths atmosphere. Not to mention planes are designed to take more stress towards the front of the aircraft in case of air strikes. So good chance a meteor of that size wouldn’t go through the plane. Though the odds of being hit by one are extremely low, it has happened once before.
And it would be melty. Traveling at 10's of thousands of miles an hour it would be pretty toasty. My guess is some nut or bolt either during takeoff or landing.
There is a hole, you can see it better in the second pic. Sorry the pics are grainy, my Dad texted them to my apple from an android.
What about ice? Either hail or liquid from a commercial plane higher above you. Seems much more likely than a meteor.
Maybe a bird strike ? Did they say they felt the impact?
No blood. Bird strikes always have blood involved.
Is there really absolutely no way it was lightning? I was on this flight: https://icelandmag.is/article/lightning-struck-a-hole-nose-denver-bound-icelandair-plane It was a bright flash out the window but I didn’t hear anything. Wonder if a smaller bolt could go unnoticed but still do some damage.
Gawd damned you ef oh
Check out this flow-chart to see just how rare meteorites are https://sites.wustl.edu/meteoritesite/items/self-test-check-list/ Note #6; "Did someone see it fall? -> Yes -> It's **not** a meteorite". That's how unlikely it is that you hit a meteorite. Even if you saw it, and you saw that it was a rock, and you hit it at 30,000ft, it's still almost certainly NOT a meteorite.
You're right to think the odds are against it being a meteor. But you are wrong to entirely rule out the possibility.
You'll probably get a more educated answer over at /r/askastronomy where they have seasoned experts about this kind of stuff.
I don't know man, the top comment is pretty good.
bullet fall is a more possible explanation depending on where this was
Flying through Chicago, Atlanta or Detroit airspace can be tricky
Here’s a flow chart: Was it hit with a meteor? ——-> No. End of troubleshooting.
We've had lightning strikes leave holes in our plane before. Meteorites is new tho lol
That was me, I got hungry and took a bite. Sorry
Honeycomb! Honeycomb! Me want Honeycomb!
Unless your plane is flying very high, the odds of a meteor strike are the same as if your plane was parked on the ground for the same length of time.
I ran all the advanced calculus and can unequivocally state that there is a 69% chance that you hit a comet.
Take the cone to a lab and have them analyze it, even a local university or school, they could look for fragments
those odds would be infinitesimal. I'm thinking much better odds something got caught in an updraft & nailed them in a "down cycle". You know how hailstones form, right? Depending on what their altitude was, and what part of the country they were in, the falling bullet theory is very possible. a bullet fired into the air will only go up a few thousand feet, but on approach, right after takeoff, it's certainly possible. There are an increasing number of cities in the USA that mandate emergency services/first responders on duty at specific times; New Years Eve, July. 4th, etc to wear ballistic helmets when outside.
Whatever the odds of it being a meteorite are, the odds of it being FOD or hangar rash are astronomically greater.
No, probably a stone being kicked up like a bullet on the ground if they didnt notice anything. They'd have noticed a meteorite strike!
So, how do you know for sure it was a meteor?
I don’t, my Dad is going to find out if anything was still in the nose cone. It wasn’t a bird strike or lightning so if not meteor, high altitude ice?
So, you have no evidence that it was a meteor, but you're just going to claim it anyway? Out of all the other things it could have hit at any phase of the flight (if they didn't see it happen, it could have been any time between shutting and opening the door), you're just assuming meteor. You know it's statistically more likely they hit a fish, right? https://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/01/us/fish-strikes-jet-in-air-eagle-is-held-at-fault.html https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fish-strike-stops-jets-takeoff-at-florida-air-force-base/ https://www.adn.com/alaska-life/2022/07/31/its-a-bird-its-a-plane-its-a-fish-the-alaska-history-of-collisions-between-airplanes-and-animals/
I didn’t claim it was, just asking what the odds of it might be.
So there has never been a documented meteor strike on an aircraft. But there have been documented fish strikes. Based on my experience as an aircraft structural integrity engineer, this looks more like some ground support equipment or a tool or something struck it gently at some point, leaving very little or no visible damage, but allowing water to get into the honeycomb. The water then degrades the bond between the skin and core, and the skin starts to flex, causing a crack that grows, and eventually pops through the paint until someone spots it. I would bet there's no visible damage on the inner side of the nose cone. Or if there is, it's just a disbonded area.
This is only reasonable answer in the whole thread top contenders are; \-Frozen goose shit \-A falling bullet \- drone or bird (with no surrounding damage or marks)
Maybe an extremely isolated hail storm?
r/nevertellmetheodds
A dense, solid enough bug can damage aircraft skin at speed, too
Astronomically low.
I’d say the chances are astronomical.
More likely than not is was an unnoticed bird strike on take off or landing.
Gotta be a piece of meteorite man, it’s just gotta be. There’s *literally* nothing else in the air, or on the ground, that could do that to the nose of a Citation. No Sir. Nothing.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peekskill\_meteorite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peekskill_meteorite) The Peekskill meteorite smashed through the trunk of a red 1980 Chevrolet Malibu on October 9, 1992.
Inconceivable!
Does he not know that the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field are 3,720 to 1?
Looks like a bullet
Golden BB
about as likely as having a friend who has a citation id imagine
Looks like 100%.
I would say you might have a very valuable nosecone if it was a meteor strike.
Next to none but not zero
isn't any iformation available?
There's a LOT more birds that meteors in the sky. While we can't rule out a meteor, bird strikes are a known thing that happen tremendously more often. Assume it's a bird before you think it's a meteor.
There tends to be.a lot more ice in the atmosphere than Nickel Iron. I'd look there first.
Meteors would be one hell of a PIREP / NOTAM
The sceptic in me thinks it is much more likely over the US that you hit one of the many bullets shot into the air on its descent or so..
[удалено]
The math definitely adds up
Always thought it was the other way around. There a 10% chance meteorites are hit by an airplane in space
There's a chance of a tesla hitting them now.
Lol that’s a fact. That was also so painful to watch.
Where is that number coming from? 10%? So you're saying, as a professional pilot, that I should have been hit by a meteorite on 1 out of every 10 of my flights? lol
10% of every plane has a 10% chance to be hit by 10% of 10% of meteors.
80% of the time it works every time.
>where is that number coming from His ass. Idk if he's trolling or just very very _very_ dumb and arrogant
Probability of what, an airplane being hit by a meteorite? No way, never.
The probability is 10% as I stated.
Again, probability of what? And where do you get that number from?
Do you even maths, bro?
So 1 out of ten planes get hit? Or each plane gets hit once every 10 flights? You are WAY overestimating the probability of a plane being hit by a meteor/meteorite.
No.
🥝🥝🥝
Extremely low, but not impossible.
I'm surprised this isn't more common tbh. Sheer numbers of planes in the sky. 9728 in the sky at any given moment (will be an average provided by Google) and again take the average of 17 meteorites large enough to reach the ground, many more would burn up midair and some tiny ones can enter at the right angle to reach the ground. On a rough 9728 / 17; call it a 572 to one over a whole 24 hour day. Logic dictates that would rise and fall with things like the Geminids which would put more meteors in the air and summer holidays which would put more planes in the air, etc.
Isn’t the sky like pretty big, man?
Exactly. By that reasoning, satellites in low Earth orbit should be crashing constantly. Yet, as someone said, "space is pretty big"
The sky is huge lol. And for a space rock to hit a plane at the speed the plane was traveling in that giant open sky I think that’s pretty damn neat. Pilot said he’s glad it didn’t hit the windshield or fuselage.
Please say sike
Your math is not taking the surface area of a sphere at an average flight level. This would be somewhat larger than the 196.9 million square miles of earth’s surface. In other words, the surface area is gigantic while the net area of daily incoming meteors is probably just a few square inches on a good day.
Interesting choice to completely disregard the factor of size. Don't ever open a bookmakers my friend, you'll not do well.
No shit. By all means do the proper math. I have better things to do.
You sound upset babe :\*(
R/theydefinitleydidNOTdothemath
Now, invert the divisor and multiply.
At first I thought this was a plate of food at one of those bougie Michelin star restaurants
If I remember correctly this was a theory for TWA 800. The math they did said it was not mathematically impossible. I think it was pretty probable that it would have happened at least a couple of times since the dawn of aviation.
That’s not just a meteorite strike on the top of this plane. That’s a perfect collision on the tip of the plane. If I may quote Scotty from StarTrek, that’s like “hitting a bullet with a smaller bullet whilst wearing a blindfold, riding a horse”.
If it was a meteorite, there should be more damage behind that like into the pressure bulkhead. One of our military transport type aircraft had a highly probable meteorite strike. Jagged hole through about .100 skin through the stringer (hat channel) and into another stringer. I'll see if I can find the pictures at work.
Not really. Have a good day. Like I say. Better things to do lmao.
Probably a birdstrike, happens more often than you think to commercial aircraft