Meteor Showers vs. Airplanes

[krnlpanick]

I haven't heard of this happening before -- is this a common problem?

http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_20901178/fireball-then-meteor-shower-ground-tankers-fighting-springer

[lordmonar]

Stupid safety getting in the way of operations 

[krnlpanick]

It may have been a few years since I took an astronomy class, but last I heard it is extremely rare for a meteor to last long enough before burning up to nothing to be any kind of threat to these guys, especially at the altitudes that I would think they are flying at...

[lordmonar]

There are meteors every day...and major showers 4-5 times a year......there have only been a handful (maybe 30) of people being injured or killed by meteors through out recorded history!

Just stupid safety getting in the way of operations! 

[JeffDG]

The only impact I can see on aircraft from meteor showers is communication skipping.

I used to do daytime meteor observations using this method.  I'd tune to an empty FM frequency, but one where I knew there was a station a couple hundred miles away.  The station would fade in periodically, basically the signal would bounce off the ionization trail of the meteor, allowing it to go over the horizon.  You could count meteors this way quite effectively.

Since the FM band is close to both the CAP radios and the air band VHF, you might, from time to time, get some radio interference from distant transmitters, but other than that:

[denverpilot]

They pulled the aircraft out because of the possibility of an unidentified aircraft inside the TFR is a Safety threat for possible collisions. It was not known at the time that it was a meteor.

No different than us yanking an aircraft out of a search grid if someone paid a private yahoo to go search for their missing loved ones.

There's also the very real concern when early reports are that an aircraft was on fire and falling, that they'd lost a firefighting aircraft. There have been some spectacular in-flight breakups of tired old firefighting aircraft in the last few years.

Time for roll-call... Ask everyone what they saw, determine if there's an interloper in the airspace, and then get back to work...

[krnlpanick]

Thanks DenverPilot! I was just curious as I had never heard of this happening before and wondered if it was a common occurrence. I also came across this while wondering if there had ever been a plane vs. meteor collision in the air.

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/teaching_aids/books_articles/Cassidy.pdf