Sometimes Chicken Little Is Right

Just when you thought you had enough to worry about when travelling by air (are my carry-on liquids in clear plastic containers? Am I wearing clothing that is easy to remove and put back on at the security check?), now comes the story that space junk just about took out a commercial airliner.

It seems that a flight between Chile and New Zealand (how quaint -- people do stuff in the Southern Hemisphere just like people here in the real world) nearly crossed paths with Russian satellite that was, in the antiseptic phrase of rocket scientists, de-orbiting. The pilot of a westbound overnight flight was more than a little alarmed to see flaming chunks of space junk falling within five miles of his airplane. Consider that at the usual speed such aircraft fly, the separation between the airplane full of sleepy passengers and a flaming hunk of used-to-be satellite was about ten seconds. Just to make the adrenaline flow a little faster, the pilot said he could hear the roar of the falling debris over the sound of his own craft's engines. (Incidentally, I have no trouble believing this. On my last trip to Florida, we passed alarmingly close to aircraft headed west in the same flight corridor. The engine note of those jets was clearly audible.)

The Russians were little help. They had alerted the airlines that the satellite would be re-entering the atmosphere so that pilots could plan for the potential danger. Unfortunately, the Russians got a few details wrong: the day, time and place of the re-entry. Bummer, dude-ski.