There are some other pictures circulating showing the exterior of the aircraft. It definitely appears something hit the aircraft. There is a skid mark on the frame around the window.[1]
Will be interesting to read if an investigative report is made public.
Despite the "internetedness" of this, it's a pretty concise summary.
I'm actually really proud of these kids for doing this. It probably won't amount to much, but they're increasingly conscious of and vocal about the problems caused by Big Tech.
By echelon an hour ago
If it's not an unusual watermark, perhaps it's to confuse AI classifiers?
By stephen_g 25 minutes ago
Probably OPs’ version of watermark..?
By slicktux 5 hours ago
Watermarks usually have branding to indicate ownership. Two distinct 3D paperclip overlays don't seem like watermarks and JonNYC doesn't use them in all photos he's posted on his thread on Bluesky.
They don't even seem to serve as visual cues.
By Archonical 3 hours ago
Interesting, that link says it might just be hail.
By fragmede 8 hours ago
A lot doesn't add up from that article though. The writer mentions the window in question is the Captain's window. From the pictures, it appears to be the First Officer's window. Also, the writer mentions pock marks consistent with hail damage in other areas of the aircraft but I haven't found any images substantiating that.
Hail is absolutely the most probably explanation, the article points to two other instances with similar outcomes. I think the doubt comes from the lack of evidence of hail or convective activity or other hail damage on the aircraft. Also, the pilot reportedly said he saw something coming at the aircraft.
By bronco21016 8 hours ago
Most journalists are pretty bad when it comes to covering aviation so I wouldn’t put much weight on the discrepancies. Half the time they can’t tell the difference between a jet and a Cessna 172. Seriously.
Journalists are generally pretty bad at covering any technical topic, unless the journalist has some specific training in that topic, which is rare.
By thayne 3 hours ago
Indeed. As an engineer I ask an expert to review anything technical that I write (or program) for accuracy where I'm not an expert, but for some reason journalists don't do this. And so here we are.
By herewulf 2 hours ago
I feel like a hail would cause a strong radar return that would have been noticed or at least documented by NEXRAD or onboard systems.
I’m sure the NTSB investigation will consider this angle, and we will find out eventually.
Love websites like this, reminding you why the internet exists :)
Wish it used a larger more readable font or at least had an option for one though.
By Razengan a few seconds ago
Thank you.
By mrexroad 3 hours ago
This made my day!
By em3rgent0rdr 5 hours ago
This is awesome
By ghxst 4 hours ago
In this case, it should be easy to detect genetic or biological material if it was a meat sack strike & rule out space debris. They don’t tend to do well when hit at several hundred mph.
The only other thing really up that high would be space debris, weather balloon payload (the balloon itself is very thin and soft), or maybe a sounding rocket (but don’t these come with NOTAMs?).
By grapesodaaaaa 8 hours ago
Or just look for the blood splat.
A bird at hundreds of miles an hour leaves a heck of a blood trail.
By potato3732842 5 hours ago
He took a duck in the face at 250 knots.
By fyver 3 hours ago
Demoiselle crane flies over Himalayas and over Everest during its yearly migration, so it'd be flying at least 30k feet high.
I only know that from Planet Earth documentary, which was such a great show!
By ardel95 6 hours ago
It hit the plane on the front. Doesn't something like a bird that flies at a stable altitude increase the chance of a collision on the front?
By gus_massa 4 hours ago
If you're traveling at 500mph, any relatively stationary object is likely to hit you on the front.
By kijin an hour ago
I can't remember the species, but there's a bird that files crazy high. I think it's a vulture.
By ChrisMarshallNY 9 hours ago
Yes, vultures can fly crazy high, and do a lot of damage to aircraft.
They are a well-known nemesis of military planes, that fly faster and don't have redundancy to survive a hit.
By marcosdumay 9 hours ago
It should be noted that many species are occasionally hit at altitudes thought to be impossible for them to fly at.
Yeah, if I had to predict that kind of collision with fauna, I would fail.
By marcosdumay 8 hours ago
Given this happened 400 ft past the end of the runway, I really don’t think the altitude involved would be very surprising
By JoelMcCracken 7 hours ago
That probably depends on the plane.
The A-10 Warthog is known for being quite tough. It operates relatively slowly, at small-arms altitudes, so it can take a licking.
By ChrisMarshallNY 6 hours ago
> They are a well-known nemesis of military planes, that fly faster and don't have redundancy to survive a hit.
Wait, military aircraft have LESS redundancy to survive "hits" than civil?
By michaelcampbell 7 hours ago
>Wait, military aircraft have LESS redundancy to survive "hits" than civil?
How many single engine civilian jets are there?
By potato3732842 5 hours ago
AFAIK (what is not much on the military side), fighters are all optimized for performance, and not resilience. And fighters that work on improving the crew options focus on survivability instead of resilience because it tends to weight less.
As a result, resilience isn't great.
Bombers and logistic planes have redundancy.
By marcosdumay 6 hours ago
The small ones have less, yes. In compensation, they have ejection seats.
By hollerith 5 hours ago
Um yeah that's really surprising considering military planes are designed for situations where there are being shot at.
By wkat4242 7 hours ago
Civil aircraft usually have at least two engines and military - usually one.
By mynegation 7 hours ago
It seems like the article has been updated: "Sources told AVweb Sunday that the focus of the investigation is on a weather balloon payload." This is far more likely than a meteor.
By jjwiseman 2 hours ago
> Apparently only one layer of the windshield was damaged
How does that square with the picture of the pilot’s arm with tiny cuts? Did the space debris only damage the internal layer? Something is not adding up to me here.
By krisoft 10 hours ago
Maybe the outermost layers just transferred the energy to the innermost, which exploded tiny shards of glass? In general though, I agree, weird.
By gnarlouse 10 hours ago
And in tank warfare this is called spalling
A projectile hits the armor and doesn't penetrate it, but the armor inside still fragments and injured the operators
By Jalad 9 hours ago
There a picture of glass spall in the cockpit and it's not unusual for ballistics glass to spall when hit by a projectile.
This was also adopted by The Expanse, where the interiors of ships (particularly war ships) are coated in antispalling coatings.
By hinkley 7 hours ago
Hey bossman thanks for pointing this out. Will have to look for it next time I watch. Yam seng.
By lotrjohn 6 hours ago
*bosmang. I'm not sure it's mentioned in the show, but it is in the books.
By usefulcat an hour ago
It’s mentioned in the books, kopeng. I think it comes up in some of the repair scenes, but there’s such a jargon dump in many of them that it might slip by. Naomi is caressing some of it at one point, like she’s petting a cat. Which is not far off from how she sees the Roci.
By hinkley 5 hours ago
didn't help Shed Garvey lol
By flashman 6 hours ago
My read is that it works mostly for battle shrapnel and space mining accidents and does nothing for kinetic weapons, hit or miss for micrometeoroids.
By hinkley 5 hours ago
That would be two layers though.
But the coloration in the window sure suggests spalling. I’m surprised the tempered glass did that much damage. That takes a lot of velocity. Which is probably why they aren’t thinking bird.
By hinkley 7 hours ago
Came here to ask the same thing -- something is missing from the reporting because this makes absolutely no sense.
By crazygringo 7 hours ago
I suspect the cuts on the pilot's arm are from BEFORE the incident. The blood looks a pretty dried up and the yellowish streaks look like some kind of antiseptic ointment was applied. The oval shaped wound closest to the camera looks like it's been healing. Could be wrong though.
By squirtle24 4 hours ago
Now I'm just imagining the object hitting the window, the pilot looking down at his arm injury from the bowl of petunias that hit the plane yesterday, and thinking "not again."
By Nition 3 hours ago
Why would there be a picture of the arm circulating if the injuries are from another incident? I won’t dispute your analysis of the photo because I don’t know anything about the subject
By onionisafruit 3 hours ago
Edit: I take that back. Another photo has emerged showing more blood.
None of the articles I have seen have said the lacerations are a result of the "space debris" incident. The linked article simply says "One of the photos shows a pilot’s arm peppered with small cuts and scratches", and which is not the same as "the pilot said the shattering glass caused the cuts you see on his arm."
I am saying it is possible that the pilot had a previous, unrelated injury, and it just so happened to be captured in the picture of the windshield. That picture is going viral because it was likely one of the first pics from the incident, but it does not mean his injuries are necessarily from the incident. I was only pointing this out based on the way the blood looked more dried up and treated/healing.
By squirtle24 3 hours ago
The pilot probably took the photograph after landing. There's no time to take selfies during an emergency!
By kijin an hour ago
Not saying it's what's happened here, but it's very easy for someone to post any image and claim it's from the same incident. Get the post enough attention and if it seems genuine enough other people will share and repost without fact checking, then people will share and reposts the reposts, and so on.
Professional outlets do this all the time, and they're _paid_ not to mess this up. Copying other outlet's bad reporting without fact checking, then once a couple more "corroborating" articles come up (or one from a reputable outlet) and it'll just be repeated as fact, they can't all be wrong right?
By MindSpunk an hour ago
The article itself says the object was probably a weather balloon, not space debris, and the title of the article is now "United MAX Hit by Falling Object at 36,000 Feet".
Maybe the title here should be updated?
By thayne 3 hours ago
> Whatever hit the plane, it was an enormously rare event and possibly the first time anything has collided with an aircraft at that altitude other than a projectile launched with that intended purpose.
There it goes the big sky theory once again, someone let the guy know there were six mid air collisions this year alone.
By throwawayffffas 13 minutes ago
There should be small pieces of whatever they hit embedded in the body & glass of the aircraft. As long as they are analyzed, the cause of this won't remain a mystery forever.
By hughes 10 hours ago
Unless it was hail.
By shrx 9 hours ago
My first thought was that this is more likely to be a spontaneous failure of the windshield glass under pressure, due to manufacturing flaw or improper maintenance. Things like that have certainly happened before. But then again, it seems weird that glass fragments would be projected inward in that scenario.
By Reason077 9 hours ago
There are pictures of the outside where you can clearly see impact damage to the top of the window frame.
By rootusrootus 8 hours ago
> it seems weird that glass fragments would be projected inward in that scenario
At speed, I don't know what the outside pressure on the windshield would be, but I'd be surprised if it was lower than the cabin air pressure.
After all, it is called a wind "shield".
By WalterBright 9 hours ago
Plugging in 35k ft altitude, and 775 ft/s velocity here (https://www.spaceworks.aero/fcc2/index.html) gives dynamic pressure of 220 lb/ft2, vs ~2100 lb/ft2 for 1atm at sea level (the same calculator says 7k ft altitude has a static pressure of ~1600 lb/ft2, or rough idea of cabin air pressure).
By icegreentea2 8 hours ago
The static pressure at 30,000 feet would have to be added in, around 550 lb/ft2, so it looks like the pressure inside is greater than outside.
By WalterBright 7 hours ago
At that height if windows are damaged enough to hurt captain or pilot, would the flight lose balance because of air coming in? How did they land in that situation? There is no mention of that in the article.
By the_arun 6 hours ago
Don't worry, if it can be blamed on Boeing, it will be.
By SoftTalker 9 hours ago
Well, they do make satellites...
By pdabbadabba 8 hours ago
Not unless you want to be spontaneously hit by a falling meteorite yourself in some kind of freak accident / suicide scenario.
So normally your wounds don’t scab over instantaneously, what is the real story here? Obviously the majority of satellites are actually balloons/sataloons.
By bigbrained124 2 hours ago
I didn't see any scabs. Wounds looked quite fresh to me.
By RyanOD 2 hours ago
"Something from “space” may have just struck a United Airlines flight over Utah" "“NTSB gathering radar, weather, flight recorder data.”": https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/10/something-from-space-m... (arstechnica.com/space/2025/10/something-from-space-may-have-just-struck-a-united-airlines-flight-over-utah/)
By sipofwater 9 hours ago
My first guess would a bird. Bird strikes happen all the time; there are billions of birds. Next guess would be a drone; there are a lot more drones flying around than spacecraft.
By Stevvo 8 hours ago
At 36000'?
By michaelcampbell 7 hours ago
Ruppell’s Griffon Vulture is the only bird clocked that high, but my understanding is that we’ve been moving estimates higher for a bunch of birds over the last couple of decades. Absence of proof and proof of absence and so forth. I think people have been paying more attention.
That vulture looks like a big boy too. So not impossible.
Edit: this bird is South American, adapted to the Andes, which is a bit of a hike to Colorado.
By hinkley 7 hours ago
Doubt birds can leave damage on the metal frame of the window like the case here. It looks like metal on metal contact
By delfinom 4 hours ago
Out of all planes, it had to be the 737 max
By jbverschoor 8 hours ago
On track to be the most popular model for US domestic travel, replacing the older 737s
By conradev 7 hours ago
I'm sticking to Airbus for the foreseeable future. Though there are plenty of older Boeings still flying too.
By herewulf 2 hours ago
It’s gonna be like Honda Accord thefts. Super common car, with certain attributes that make is slightly more tempting.
By hinkley 7 hours ago
That’s why I only fly the 737 Pro Max.
By bombcar 5 hours ago
i remember i had a plane flight that was horrendously delayed once, and then finally when we hop on board they make an announcement about it being a 737 Max and I laughed, thinking they were joking...
By cdelsolar 7 hours ago
Isn't the speed of descent of objects falling out of orbit so great they usually burn up before hitting the ground, and wouldn't that speed cause them to easily penetrate into the interior of the plane?
By fracus 7 hours ago
If an object survives reentry far enough to be at airliner altitudes, it will have significantly slowed down already and probably be falling at or near terminal velocity. Of course it depends on the shape and density of the object.
By mikkupikku 7 hours ago
My money is on drone.
There are more drones up there than falling rocks. There are probably more classified drones up there than falling rocket parts. I suspect this aircraft collided with something far more terrestrial. Something with its transponder off. Any chinese balloons over denver at the moment?
By sandworm101 5 hours ago
Not clear yet what happened but from the exterior photos it’s pretty obvious they struck something.
Space debris isn’t implausible, although there are several other possibilities too.
Much higher than a few decades back, but still effectively zero. Even after putting up X thousands of satellites up into orbit, they still physically cover a tiny total surface area. And the same goes for planes. So two of these colliding would be a monumental freak accident, which is why I'm still assuming it's not space debris until more information shows up.
By tavavex 9 hours ago
Given that it happened, 100%?
By michaelcampbell 7 hours ago
50-50, either it happens, or it doesn't
By cdelsolar 7 hours ago
A million to one, they said.
By inopinatus 8 hours ago
But it has to be _exactly_ a million to one
By PLenz 6 hours ago
That's if it was coming from Mars specifically.
By antod 7 hours ago
But still they come.
By robotresearcher 8 hours ago
Dude's arm looks like scabs and I don't see anywhere that claims they are related to the impact.
By JackAcid 8 hours ago
looks like dried blood to me.
By autoexec 2 hours ago
Can you tell me why the left window appears to be held on with a really big paperclip.
By sml156 6 hours ago
His arm is covered in sharpnel wounds from the windshield being shattered due to the energy of impact. That is how sharpnel wounds look like. There's a good chance he went to the hospital later to get the glass pulled out of his arm.
By delfinom 4 hours ago
It definitely would more likely be a meteorite than anything else.
By saltyoldman 12 hours ago
What makes a meteorite more likely
By SteveNuts 9 hours ago
Just that many more of them are present in the atmosphere than reentering space debris pieces.
By schoen 9 hours ago
> many more of them are present in the atmosphere
At 36,000 feet?
By JumpCrisscross 9 hours ago
Why not? What comes down must come from somewhere up.
By amelius 8 hours ago
What makes a meteorite not "space debris" though?
By wkat4242 7 hours ago
The same which makes fallen leaves in the forest not "garbage". Space debris is man-made, meteorites aren't and hence are not space debris [1].
still a lot more birds than meteorites or spacecraft.
By natebc 7 hours ago
There are not many birds at cruising altitude. Some, but not many.
By dboreham 7 hours ago
We are nearly at the peak of the annual Orionid meteor shower. [0] There should be a higher probability of encountering meteor debris during this period than during periods where there are no meteor showers in progress. We are passing through the debris from Halley's Comet right now and for about another two weeks.
Could this be from another plane on the same nav route but higher altitude?
By russdill 8 hours ago
Anyone else think about that Asimov robot story with the "intuitive" robot "Jane"? She had discovered which stars were most likely to have planets around them with the right conditions for life and was flying back on an airplane with her human handler when it was hit by a meteorite.
By cdelsolar 7 hours ago
Wasn't there a significant Starlink deorbiting recently?
By ecommerceguy 9 hours ago
If this did happen to be space debris as a result of human activity then the likelihood that this becomes a more common occurrence is likely seeing how Kuiper and Starlink are looking to have somewhere around 42,000 satellites and it currently has around 8,000; Kuiper also has similar ambitions.
By neverkn0wsb357 6 hours ago
Even with that the odds of this have to be less likely than winning the lottery while getting bit by a shark that was simultaneously struck by lightning.
By ocdtrekkie 6 hours ago
Starlink satellites demise upon re-entry though so they're not going to be the cause.
By mlindner 6 hours ago
They were busy demising until the plane interrupted the demising?!
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