The cracked windshield of a Boeing 737 MAX-8, operating as UA1093, has captured attention across the aviation community. Was space debris to blame?
How’s your day going? Hopefully better than that of the flight crew of last Thursday’s United Airlines flight UA1093. Having departed from Denver (DEN) bound for Los Angeles (LAX), the roughly two year old Boeing 737 MAX 8 was established at a cruising level of 36,000 feet on October 16th, when the flight crew experienced a sudden crack across the cockpit windshield. The crew decided to divert to Salt Lake City (SLC), descended to approximately 26,000 feet, and landed safely short of an hour later.
When speculation takes flight
What makes this incident stand out is that the more speculative corners of the Internet soon were flooded with images of cracked windshields (example shown below), a pedestal covered in broken glass, and a bloody arm—supposedly belonging to one of the pilots of said flight. Most tickling of all? The theory floated that space debris was the cause of the incident. The NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) has launched an investigation and in due time, we hopefully will receive answers. Until then, let’s sift through some facts that we already know.
— JonNYC (@xJonNYC) October 18, 2025
Windshield damage per se isn’t unheard of in the aviation industry. Not that this is common fare, but it happens. Flight deck windows are designed using multiple layers, with forward facing sections being heated for even greater resistance to damage. Very rarely will more than one layer crack, leaving literally at least another layer of redundancy.
Most windshield failures occur at lower altitudes due to hail, bird strikes, or temperature stress. With UA1093 having been established at a comfortable 36,000 feet—encountering hail seems unlikely, to say the least. We wouldn’t put any money down for any feathery friends soaring those kinds of altitudes either. But what about space debris?
Could space debris have hit United Airlines UA1093?
If confirmed, it could represent the first documented instance of such an impact on a commercial passenger aircraft. Chances of this being the case remain slim. In a report to the US Congress in 2021, the FAA (Federal Aviation Authority), stated that there was, on an annual basis, “…conservatively at most, about a 0.1 percent chance that falling space debris would result in a single global injury or death during an aviation activity”.
As comforting as those numbers are to behold, it is at the same time interesting to entertain the notion that the airspace above us (and above any flight path, it should be pointed out) is getting more and more cluttered by junk. For decades, aircraft designers have engineered against turbulence, weather, and mechanical failure, but the growing volume of orbiting debris adds a new dimension to safety considerations. Although the risk remains extraordinarily low—the potential consequences of a high-speed impact at cruise altitude are significant enough to merit further study.
Weather balloons enter the conversation
A few days after the incident, yet another potential explanation emerged. The CEO of WindBorneWX offered his opinion on the matter on social media platform X, suggesting that one of the weather balloons used by his company to provide weather forecast intel may have played a part in the incident. This in response to another user who noted that the window framing of UA1093 looked like it had been blasted by sand—adding that said weather balloons use sand as ballast. A preliminary report by the company has apparently been shared with both the NTSB and the FAA.
Hi Scott, cofounder/CEO of @WindBorneWx here. Yes, I think this was a WindBorne balloon. We learned about UA1093 and the potential that it was related to one of our balloons at 11pm PT on Sunday and immediately looked into it. At 6am PT, we sent our preliminary investigation to…
— John Dean (@johndeanl) October 21, 2025
A safe landing and a swift return
For now, we don’t know what (or even if something) hit UA1093. If anything, we can be thankful that the aircraft made its way back down to Earth safely, thanks to sound decisions made by the pilots (the startling effect must have been quite, well, startling). The aircraft itself, a Boeing 737 MAX 8 registered as N17327, remained on the ground in Salt Lake City for three days after the incident. After initial repairs to make the 737 airworthy, it was flown to Chicago Rockford International Airport (RFD) for more extensive work before it returns to commercial service.
What are your thoughts on the matter? Make sure to leave a comment in the section below.
14 Responses
Would have made an interesting read, if the picture of the crack was in the article and a few paragraphs of the pilot or copilot behind the cracked screen.
I agree. While we don’t own the rights of the images, that technically still remain unverified, we instead decided to embed one of the tweets featuring images of what is stated as the broken windshield of UA1093.
I LOVE FR24 JUST PLS DO MORE VIDS PLS
Sounds like weather balloons, and other high altitude instrumentation packages, should be equipped with ADSB.
Warn pilots and let the civilian population know what’s up there.
https://sondehub.org/#!mt=Mapnik&mz=3&qm=3h&mc=27.21556,-32.7832&box=aboutbox
Look here….its pretty cool for tracking balloons
Non credo alla radiosonda con sabbia. Le radiosonde arrivano fino a circa 35.000 metri, esplodendo. Se ci fosse stata sabbia cadendo, avrebbe fatto danni, con velocità a oltre 300 km/h.
E per quale motivo la sabbia? una radiosonda (quelle più comuni) pesa circa 80 grammi. Oppure potrebbe essere una radiosonda non meteorologica ma per altri esperimenti. Seguo da anni (con tracciatura) le radiosonde via radio e qui in Italia non hanno sabbia!
IK0JWG Rob
ES UNA HERRAMIENTA MUY UTIL PORQUE ME PERMITE SEGUIR LOS VUELOS Y SABER CON CERTEZA LA HORA DE LLEGADA
Love the interactive nature of this issue. Allowing comments is always interesting. Just please do a better job of monitoring comments for relevance and language than a certain other aviation website!
This is an excellent article and I like that it accurately concludes that we don’t know what hit UA1093. The weather balloon explanation seems suspiciously well timed – flashbacks to Roswell! Granted that weather balloons are slow moving and can have high transparency and low reflectivity, and therefore are often excluded by ground radar, and not easily seen by rapidly approaching humans on an intercept course. This, by the way, makes a persuasive argument for all weather balloons to be equipped with transponders – even light-weight, limited range ones – so they are detectable by a nearby aircraft’s TCAS enabling its pilot to take evasive action.
But if not a weather balloon or falling space debris, could the offending object have been a UAP – a “tic tac” of unknown origin?! Well, that can’t be ruled out either. If commercial aircraft were equipped with something as simple as a car’s dashcam, perhaps we could have seen what it was. Has the government launched a covert ground search for the debris of *anything* below the reported location of this incident? The truth is out there, but we may never know!
It would make sense that WindBorne would know where all their ballons are at any given time, otherwise what good would their data be.
This is a no brainer. Windborne System knows exactly where their 3 lb weather balloons are 24/7.
WindBorne operates and maintains Atlas—a global sensing network that comprises the largest balloon constellation in the world, continuously collecting in-situ atmospheric soundings from pole to pole. Atlas is powered by autonomous, long-duration high-altitude balloons called Global Sounding Balloons (GSBs) that drastically improve upon legacy weather balloons in performance, endurance, sustainability, and cost.
They are deployed 12+ days in a typical flight, with demonstrated capability for 75+
day missions. Their wx data and position is transmitted in near real time.
“Somebody” knows a lot more than they are divulging…
If anyone is interested in tracking balloons, there is a site for that:
https://sondehub.org/
On AvTalk they mentioned that the balloon’s “components” consists simply of a sandbag for ballast, a solar panel and an antenna. (They forgot the weather sensor package that is solar-powered). That fits my understanding of a radiosonde weather balloon… it has no propulsion, just buoyancy (remember China’s weather balloon that drifted randomly over the U.S.?) and it’s mission is to drift with the wind as it ascends so winds aloft, temperature, pressure, humidity, cloud levels, etc. at various altitudes can be measured and broadcast to the ground station. The ground station shares the data with other countries, gets the data those countries have collected, and feeds it all into a supercomputer to generate U.S. weather forecasts. Other countries do the same. About 1200 ground stations worldwide do this twice a day to generate the 0000Z and 1200Z daily weather updates.
But AvTalk also said something along the lines of WindBorneWX intends to use ADS-B data to locate airplanes and then maneuver their balloons out of their way.
??!! How do you maneuver a weather balloon that has no propulsion? Or did I completely misunderstand what WindBorneWX is intending to do?
You can’t steer a weather balloon like a drone or plane. Instead, you “maneuver” it by changing altitude to catch different wind currents, since winds at various heights often blow in different directions.