A JetBlue flight's sudden plunge over Florida earlier this fall may have been caused by a cosmic ray from a distant supernova, according to a space weather expert. The Oct. 30 incident involved an Airbus A320 flying from Cancun, Mexico, to New Jersey's Newark, with the plane abruptly losing altitude for no obvious reason, injuring at least 15 passengers and forcing an emergency landing in Tampa. Airbus initially blamed "intense solar radiation" for marring critical flight-control data and grounded 6,000 A320s for software updates.
However, Clive Dyer, a radiation specialist at the UK's University of Surrey, tells Space.com that solar activity was normal on that day. Instead, he suspects a cosmic ray—high-energy particles launched by exploding stars—may have triggered a glitch in the plane's electronics. These particles constantly bombard Earth's atmosphere: The BBC describes them as raining down like someone "throwing marbles across a table." And while they often go unnoticed, they occasionally disrupt microelectronics, causing what engineers call "single-event upsets," which manifest as a random bit flip or even hardware failure.
Dyer notes that similar events are rare but not unheard of, though he believes manufacturers have grown complacent over the decades due to no major incidents. In 2008, a Qantas Airbus experienced unexplained nosedives that investigators never fully explained. Dyer says the Airbus software update is overdue, especially with the sun's activity increasing.
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