The mysterious impact of a United Airlines aircraft in flight last week has sparked plenty of theories as to its cause, from space debris to high-flying birds.
However the question of what happened to flight 1093, and its severely damaged front window, appears to be answered in the form of a weather balloon.
“I think this was a WindBorne balloon,” Kai Marshland, co-founder of the weather prediction company WindBorne Systems, told Ars in an email on Monday evening. “We learned about UA1093 and the potential that it was related to one of our balloons at 11 pm PT on Sunday and immediately looked into it. At 6 am PT, we sent our preliminary investigation to both NTSB and FAA, and are working with both of them to investigate further.”
WindBorne is a six-year old company that seeks to both collect weather observations with its fleet of small, affordable weather balloons as well as use that atmospheric data for its proprietary artificial intelligence weather models.
Online detectives solve the case
Scott Manley, a popular YouTube creator and pilot, was among the first people to speculate online about the collision being caused by a WindBorne balloon, having coordinated the position of a balloon data point with the flight path of the aircraft. Asked about this by Ars, the company confirmed that its balloon likely hit the plane.
The strike occurred Thursday, during a United Airlines flight from Denver to Los Angeles. Images shared on social media showed that one of the two large windows at the front of a 737 MAX aircraft was significantly cracked. Related images also reveal a pilot’s arm that has been cut multiple times by what appear to be small shards of glass.