NJ-bound plane that suddenly plunged likely hit by ‘cosmic rays’ from exploding supernova
“Star wars!”
An Air Breeze Airbus A320 bound for New Jersey experienced a dramatic dive of thousands of feet in October, taking 15 people to hospitals. Space physicists claim the sudden loss of altitude could be the result of a swarm of high‑energy particles—cosmic rays—originating from a supernova far beyond our galaxy.
Clive Dyer, a radiation specialist from the University of Surrey, told space.com that the JetBlue flight was struck by a cascade of particles launched from a distant stellar explosion that had taken millions of years to reach Earth. He highlighted that such rays can disturb modern microelectronics, flipping bits from zero to one or vice versa, corrupting data, and even causing outright hardware failures when they induce damaging currents within avionics.
The incident occurred on the route from Cancun to Newark on 30 Oct. The aircraft slipped out of the sky with no visible cause, prompting the pilots to regain control and bring the plane down safely in Tampa, Florida. Roughly 20 passengers were seriously hurt, many with blood‑stained head injuries.
Airbus officials, however, blamed the malfunction on intense solar radiation from our own star affecting the 20‑year‑old plane’s navigation computer. Dyer, who has been researching solar effects on aircraft electronics for decades, countered that the solar activity at the time would not have been strong enough to trigger such an event. He therefore maintained that a supernova’s cosmic ray flux is the more plausible culprit.
Cosmic rays are produced when massive stars end their lives in spectacular supernovas, spearing out protons that travel at the speed of light across the universe. As these particles make their way toward Earth, they can strike avionics—whether on a sensor or a central computer—disrupting the aircraft’s flight systems and yielding sudden, unexplained changes in altitude.
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