Near miss for aircraft in New Zealand air space

While United States space agency Nasa is convinced flaming objects falling perilously close to an Auckland-bound jet on Tuesday night were not from a Russian satellite, New Zealand authorities say the event, which happened while the Chilean jet was five hours from New Zealand above the Pacific Ocean was extremely unusual and they are “very concerned” at the safety risks.

The pilot of the Lan Chile Airbus A340, travelling between Santiago and Auckland, notified Auckland air traffic controllers after seeing a flaming object hurtling across the sky just 10 kilometres in front of and behind his plane at 10pm on Tuesday, with the flaming objects fell so close to the jet that the pilot could hear the roar it made as they broke the sound barrier.

Airways New Zealand is investigating the incident and said it appeared space debris had fallen from a Russian satellite about 12 hours before Russian agencies said it was expected, but Nicholas Johnson, orbital debris chief scientist for Nasa’s Johnson Space Center said he checked with the Russians and that debris, an empty Progress resupply ship that had been at the International Space Station, fired its re-entry rockets a half day after the airliner reported the near-miss.

Johnson told The Associated Press, “Unless someone has their times wrong, there appears to be no correlation,” adding, he knew of no other re-entering space junk spotted by global trackers at about that time, with space experts saying it could have been a meteor.

Bill Ailor, Director of the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies at the Aerospace Corporation of El Segundo, California said about 50 meteoroids enter the Earth’s atmosphere every day, mostly burning up as they speed in and those that survive to hit the earth are called meteorites.

He added that by contrast, about 150 pieces of man-made space junk fall back to Earth each year, with about two-thirds of those unplanned entries, adding that larger pieces of man-made space equipment, such as the Progress resupply ship, have motors to guide them back to Earth.

He also said, “If they are calculated to have more than a 1 in 10,000 chance of hitting people, they are shifted to a safer path,  though small errors can lead to large variations in where the debris hits”, adding, “For de-orbit, everything has to be lined up right. . . and your math has to be right and also your time has to be precise.”  “There are lots of places where you can have problems.”

Ailor said that no one has ever been killed by rogue man-made space junk, though in 1997, an Oklahoma woman was grazed in the shoulder by space junk, but not injured,  

One plane spotter, tuned into a high-frequency radio broadcast at the time, told the Sydney Morning Herald the pilot “reported that the rumbling noise from the space debris could be heard over the noise of the aircraft”.

“He saw a piece of debris lighting up as it re-entered. He was one very worried pilot, as you would imagine.”

The flight landed safely at Auckland at 3.55am yesterday, and it is understood continued to Australia.

Royal New Zealand Air Force Squadron Leader Glenn Davis told The Dominion Post that the plane came “far too close” to hitting the object, saying, “It would have been 40 seconds from hitting the space junk, if the A340 was cruising at the same speed as our Boeing 757s (900kmh).”

Lan Chile would not comment yesterday.

Ken Mitchell, a spokesman for Airways New Zealand, which provides air navigation services in New Zealand airspace, said Russian authorities had warned this month that a satellite would fall to earth in the South Pacific sometime on Wednesday and that information was passed on to all airlines and pilots who were due to be travelling in the region at that time, and it was up to them whether to fly, adding, “It is not uncommon to receive notification of space debris but it is very uncommon for that information to be incorrect.”

“We are very concerned at the safety issues and we filed a formal incident report with CAA today.”, with Civil Aviation Authority Communications Manager Bill Sommer saying the incident was “very, very unusual” an the Authority would investigate the incident and, if any system failure was found, it would be reported to the International Civil Aviation Organisation, adding, the Pacific was often used to dump returning satellites because the airspace was relatively empty, but having stuff come in by mistake is really unusual.”

Report by The Mole from www.stuff.co.nz  and The Sydney Morning Herald