A JetBlue Airbus A320 flight flying from Cancun, Mexico to Newark, New Jersey, suddenly lost altitude by thousands of feet, injuring at least 15 passengers. The incident took place on October 3,0 and now, after a month, a space expert has suggested that a cosmic ray might have caused the disruption. The aircraft dropped down in the air while it was above Florida. The pilots regained control of the plane but had to make an emergency landing at Tampa International Airport as several passengers were injured. Airbus issued a statement attributing the incident to intense solar radiation and grounded 6,000 A320s for software updates. But scientists have now found out that solar radiation levels on October 30 were unremarkable and nowhere near levels that could affect aircraft electronics. Clive Dyer, a space weather and radiation expert at the University of Surrey in the UK, told Space.com that a cosmic ray from a distant star explosion hit the computer on the plane.

Cosmic rays can interact with microelectronics

Cosmic rays arise when massive stars explode in supernovas at the end of their lives. The explosions accelerate streams of protons, hurling them across the universe at the speed of light. “[Cosmic rays] can interact with modern microelectronics and change the state of a circuit,” Dyer said. “They can cause a simple bit flip, like a 0 to 1 or 1 to 0. They can mess up information and make things go wrong. But they can cause hardware failures too, when they induce a current in an electronic device and burn it out.“Dyer said solar radiation reached the peak two weeks after the JetBlue incident and so it made sense that JetBlue decided to go for a software update but the JetBlue incident could not take place only because of solar radiation.