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Space Debris Narrowly Misses Airliner
An anonymous reader writes "An airliner jet traveling from Chile to New Zealand early today was in for an interesting ride. Flaming space debris — the remains of a Russian satellite — came hurtling back to Earth not far from a commercial jet on its way to Auckland, New Zealand. Here's further justification for the growing concern of the increasing amounts of space garbage orbiting our planet. From the article: 'The pilot of a Lan Chile Airbus A340 ... notified air traffic controllers at Auckland Oceanic Centre after seeing flaming space junk hurtling across the sky just five nautical miles in front of and behind his plane...'"
Bloody Russions!
I have a "Zero Policy" tolerance.
*/
YOU hit spacejunk!
Chili?
Russion?
I hate it when my spicy peppers serve as runways.... editors, come on. Are you kidding me?
Damne those Russions!!!
Sorry... couldn't help myself...
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
"You've got a chart filling a whole wall with interlocking pathways
and reactions to shock and the researcher says "If I can just control
this one molecule/enzyme/compound I'll stop the whole negative
physiologic cascade of post haemorrhagic shock." Yeah, right."
so it missed him by FIVE MILES? ;-)
(I kid, I kid.. that is a little too close.)
how do you know it came from rusia?
I'm curious, when did Airbus start putting rear view mirrors in their planes? I have never known it possible in any recent commercial airliner for the pilots to see back behind them.
airliner jet traveling from Chili to New Zealand
I was once nearly hit by satellite debris on a flight from TGI Friday's to Djibouti. Happens all the time.
im in ur football team russion ur offense!
I work at a major supplier for onboard electronic systems for airliners. I'll remind my boss at the next meeting to bump up the priority on the space junk laser defense system.
Looks like this article needs some proofreading (Russion?), in addition to a reasonableness check. I have never piloted an aircraft in which you could see to the rear. The only aircraft that I know of in which you can see to the rear are military fighters, and even then, the view is limited, and the pilot has rare occasion to look back. Well, actually, I take that back -- I've seen pictures of general aviation aircraft with 'bubble' canopies, but I've never actually seen one in person.
Concealed Handgun License Courses in Plano, Texas
This isn't the first time I read some news involving Chile here on slashdot before there's any local news coverage, if at all (two previous ones were the one about the mapuches complaining about a Mapudungun version of Windows and the one about the mistery corpse beached in the southern region).
It's sad that our journalism sucks so much.
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
So, how long before Planetes becomes a reality?
wikipedia's page
Animenfo's link
Using the Kessler syndrome seems to be a popular enough thing in fiction, I wonder if it'll ever get to be a problem in reality.
5 nautical miles away. A short drive, and it would have hit.
A manner in which to combat global warming is to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching earth! Now, instead of the ridulous expensive and unfeasable giant space-reflectors, thanks to human waste management (well, rather the lack of it) we have a viable means to do so!
Without knowing it, we are already heading in the good direction; we only need a concerted effort to further improve upon. If we can muster enough fine particles and bring a dustcloud of debris around our planet in low orbit, thick enough to temper the suns rays, we're compensating for our pollution here down on earth!
Pollution is the problem, but also the solution!!
Hurray!
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
after seeing flaming space junk hurtling across the sky just five nautical miles in front of and behind his plane...
Apparently the Russions developed wormhole technology! An object can be both in front of and behind a jet at the same time! I hope they don't share this technology with the Chili-ans!
Apparently, the Chili-ans have already developed the highly vaunted A-340 rear-view mirror technology. (Seriously, how do you see something 5 miles BEHIND a A-340 from the pilot seat?)
Or maybe this is just the worst summary ever. Although I'm a fan of anybody who can completely offend 160 million people in a single paragraph by misspelling the name of their nations.
Comment of the year
I think there is a very small chance of space debris reentering the atmosphere, hitting an airplane. It is possible ofcourse, but I think you've got a better chance of winning the lottery...
Most of the debris coming down is burned up before it even reaches commercial airplane altittudes. And it's not as if the sky is full of airplanes, the amount of sky taken up by airplanes is extremely small.
So I don't think this is an actual problem, it could happen but most likely it won't!
09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63
Absolutely false. That was not space junk. It was atmospheric junk, which is not a problem because it falls, burns, and rapidly becomes either vaporized or on the ground. The problem with space junk is that it just sits there in orbit and never goes away. And the orbit that it is in could cross your orbit with an extremely high closing velocity.
If we could get all of our space junk to become atmospheric junk, the problem would be solved.
Light cup, beer drink, thin so chain, neck turtle fat, man I won't say it again
"Flaming Space Debris", now that's a great name for a rock band.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Fortunately work has already been begun on Dr. Evils's Giant Magnet
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
They should have just got the Chinese to shoot the debris with their superawsomelaser and then no one would complain.
"Luck is a tag given by the mediocre to account for the accomplishments of genius." -Heinlein
The debris came within .0000000538 AU of the aircraft.
Here's one proposal. :)
1) Why do they think that was russian satellite? If it has deobited 12 hours earlier than expected, why this occured in _correct_ place?
2) (Someone already pointed at this) How could pilot see behind the plane?
to clean up the mess in our space. :-)
5 nautical miles = 9.26 km
A380-800 wing span (maximal dimension)=79.8m.
The probability of debris atcually hitting the plane is (9.26/79.8)^3*10^9 = 1,562,515.33 times smaller than the probability of the event described in the article.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
1 nautical mile == 1.2 standard miles.
So it missed him by 6 miles. Seriously, doesn't anybody around here own a real boat?
Post anonymously - For when your opinion embarrasses even you!
*stewardess over the intercom*
We at Lan Chile airlines would like to thank you for flying with us today and hope you enjoyed your flight. We will shortly be starting are decent to land so if everyone could lock their trays in the upright position and please fasten their seatbelts. Another note for those of you on the starboard side of the aircraft, if you look out your windows you will see a long forgotten Russian space satellite making its reentry back to earth. Thank you and have a nice day.
Can someone please explain how a 340 pilot can see 5nm *behind* the aircraft? They don't exactly have rear-view mirrors, ya know...
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Seriously, what are the odds of being in an aircraft and being hit by space debris?!!? 10 Million : 1, 100 Million : 1, 1 Billion : 1. This is NOT a problem. An oddity, curiosity, decent headline... yes. A problem, no.
Number of people killed per annum by falling space junk hitting aircraft - 0
Number of people killed per annum by motor accidents in the UK - 3221 (and that was a record low)
I'm not sure this story will keep me awake at night.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
"You've got a chart filling a whole wall with interlocking pathways
and reactions to shock and the researcher says "If I can just control
this one molecule/enzyme/compound I'll stop the whole negative
physiologic cascade of post haemorrhagic shock." Yeah, right."
I just hope this kind of incidents doesn't get to happen too frecuently because it certainly WILL have a cost in human lives. Anyway.... i couldn't find anything about it in main papers, such as Emol. btw.... don't get me wrong Cmdrtaco.... but can't you spell my country's name properly? 'Chili'.... what were u thinking? please make us chilean people a big fat favor... spell properly. It is spelled C H I L E.
mmmmmmmm chili ahhhhhhhhhh
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
The space debris problem is a lot like a nuclear reaction - collisions happen and debris is released which causes more collisions and the reaction continues at an exponential rate. It could get to the point where space navigation will no longer be viable.
Interesting fact - a piece of space debris the size of a small marble, traveling at 22,000 miles per hour, has the kinetic energy of a 400 pound safe dropped from about 100 feet. Imagine the damage that would result if a marble-sized object were to collide with a space craft.
It would be great if we found a way to fix the space debris problem.
5 nautical miles is approx 5.75 miles.
A340 typical cruising speed = 544 mph.
So covers 5 nautical miles in about 38 seconds.
Pretty close if you ask me.
I think this is more of a perceived risk than an actual risk.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Well, depending on how fast they were going... only a 20-30 second drive I would think.
...Technora Second Division, Debris Section!
The A340 (Depending on Variant) travels at anywhere from 544mph to 570mph. The debris was 5miles ahead and 5miles behind them. Lets take the typical cruise speed of 544mph. 544mph ~ 9miles per minute and ~ .15miles per second. So if they were a minute slower they prolly woulda hit the trailing debris, and if they were a minute faster they prolly woulda hit the leading debris. That's crazyness!
Good piloting on their fault, I'm glad nothing terrible came of this. Aviation has had enough problems.
If you were offended by anything I said... No, I'm not sorry. Please lighten up.
At least they weren't killed by a flaming toilet seat from the Mir space station like she was
It would take an inordinate amount of energy to collect space debris in that manner, according to two scientists from NASA's Orbital Debris Section (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes#_note-11).
You're welcome.
Two words: Dharma Intitiative.
And the plane was in the debris' flight path for, what? 0.2 seconds? Seems like it would be a pretty difficult to hit even if the pilot was trying.
Or let's put it this way. If all 10000 or so of Russia's satellites were deorbitted at the same time in those 25 square nautical miles, the chances are that they would still all miss.
I just had my mod points expire, but the 'exercise left to the reader' line makes this post the best I've read in days.
Russions is not spelled like onions
The pilot got 500 XP for successfully missing the debris.
3. Profit!
2. ???
1. On Soviet Slashdot, a Beowulf cluster of alien Natalie Portman overlords welcomes YOU!
All major themes of these reports -- except the existence of a startling and bright fireball -- need to be treated with EXTREME SKEPTICISM. All available documentation shows the Progress de-orbit was performed exactly on time -- and if it wasn't, it would have burned up over an entirely different part of the globe. Twelve hours earlier, its passages across the Pacific were over Kamchatka and just south of the Aleutians -- nowhere near the airborne eyewitnesses. Range estimates by pilots of bright fireballs are NOTORIOUSLY inaccurate, and pilots have been known to throw their aircraft into violent evasive maneuvers based on seeing bright fireballs that were 100 to 150 kilometers away. This is GOOD for safety's sake -- always interpret a sudden visual stimulus in the most hazardous way -- but it's bad for 'dispassionate observations'.
How did the pilot know how far away the debris was?
Like most reports of distances with falling objects like meteors and deorbiting space debris, eyewitness accounts of distance to the falling object are completely unreliable. People describe "basketball sized glowing sphere a thousand feet overhead" and it's really a pea sized meteor 70km above them. Same thing here. Now, details might come out that it showed up on weather avoidance radar, but as people are hashing out here with the video camera, there isn't one of those in the back.
... I am not surprised ...
Chilean pilots are very well training and Chilean society is all about covering your back; I know it because I am Chilean.
Putting extra cameras around the plane... knowing my country, probably they bought one, they tear it apart and copied for 1/10 of the price so they put several more around the plane... probably attached with duck tape and some wires.
And about being well trained pilots, there is yearly expo of aeronautics where different countries are invited. About 15 years ago (more or less, I am bad with dates), the USA brought the Hercules to display it. But the airport were it was supposed to land had a short runway, so they land it on the main international airport (we have only one), separate the wings from the body and transport it on trucks to the expo were it was assembled back (it was funny to see the plane in pieces on the main avenue). Next day, in the morning, the plane had disappeared; they were about to sound the alarm when it came happily landing. Turns out that there were a couple of Chilean pilots that like the plane but did not know the limitations with landing of something of that size, so they went for a joyride and brought it back. Because it was such embarrassing situation for the pilots (of both countries), they decided to keep it quiet. After this USA sold it for a low price to Chile (we have only 1 Hercules, this one). I got to know this story because I was dating the daughter of one of the techs that worked in the base were the expo was done that year.
And missing something for 5 miles when you are traveling at more than 500mph and please remember that airplanes cannot drift on the air; it is a close call
I have had it with this motherf'n flaming-space-debris on this motherfn' plane!
"In the event of a collision with a huge, fiery meteor, oxygen masks will drop from the panel above you..."
Okay. You cross the road. A car comes past 20 seconds later.
Did it come remotely close to hitting you?
Could this be a possible explanation to other mysterious airline accidents in the past?
Even to experienced pilots, a sight like this is extremely deceptive, especially at night.
I witnessed the same thing about 20 years ago, as I was flying a B-52 westbound over Montana on a night-time training flight. A Russian booster re-entered the atmosphere in front of us, traveling north to south (it had just put a satellite into polar orbit), visibly burning and breaking up. Pilots all over the western US were reporting the sight, many thinking an airliner was burning and breaking up in their immediate vicinity.
The funny thing was that even though the thing was at least 50 to 75 miles above any of us and hundreds of miles away from most of the pilots witnessing it, most were reporting it to be within a few thousand feet vertically, and less than 10 miles away.
The human visual system is just not equipped to judge the size and position of something like this without a terrestrial frame of reference. All pilots are aware of that, but in the heat of the moment, the visual illusion can be extremely powerful.
A car... no.
If flaming space debris fell from the sky a 20-second-walk ahead of me?
I'd be telling that story for years.
How about a magnetic spaceship that sweeps all garbage and then is burned in the atmosphere?
Charge a deposit on all satellite launches, refunded when the satellite is safely returned to earth or exceeds the sun's escape velocity.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
"The A340-500/-600 has taxi cameras to help the pilots during ground maneuvers."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A340
I'm fairly at least one of them is rear-facing. These are $100m+ vehicles, video cameras aren't much of an extravagance.
Why does it matter what it is? The OP's point (which I happen to agree with) was that a 30 second window isn't a big deal in this case (or most, for that matter). Whether it's "flying space debris," a car, a boat, a train, or whatever...it's outside of your control. I once was vacationing on a beach in Mexico and saw a coconut fall about two feet in front of a walking dude. No doubt it probably would have killed him had he taken an extra step - the dude was a bit freaked out, and understandably so. THAT is a close call...but a 30 second window relative to your speed, I don't see as a big deal. The plane is probably more likely to suck up a bird into its engine upon takeoff than to get hit by random space debris. Well, for now, anyway...
I just what to know how he saw it out of the back of the plane. It's not like they've got rearview mirrors on their Boeings.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I think the story was written because it was interesting, not because "OMG, What do we do about Space Trash?! Think of the children!!".
Interesting things happen in the world, that people might like to hear about. And so people tell them.
Just because people don't die or it doesn't affect the next big Linux distro doesn't mean it's useless.
And so the point of my other posts was..... I think this story was interesting.
That was all.
, but "turdsicles" falling from aircraft toilets are more common than you might think.
r uary/12/local/stories/02local.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_ice_(aircraft)
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2003/Feb
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Even if ignore that the this is one time incident, probability that the plane and space debris will apppear in the same point of the mentioned 5 x 5 x 5 nautical mile cube is about 1 : 10,000,000. In other words very similar to winning main prize in Lotto.
JAM
That still is 38 seconds. When I would consider anything crossing the road so close to my car that it would hit it in 38 seconds of driving at typical car speeds, it would be "near collision" all the time. And the typical car0-on-road situation is only 2D, as opposed to 3D for aircraft.
The place and time are disturbingly close: http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0703/27progress23p /
I think they are sensationalizing the story a bit too much. That particular model of plane cruises at roughly 550 MPH. The debris were roughly 5 miles away, and being called a near miss. 550/60 = ~9.16 Miles per min 5/9.16 = ~0.54 mins apart Now, at first glance that might seem close, but consider that if someone crosses the street 30 seconds before you get there, you DID NOT narrowly miss them. You missed them by a quite a lot, at least in my opinion.
"Flaming debris" involves a lot higher speeeds, since the reason it's flaming isn't friction, it's almost adiabatic compression of the air in front of the falling object. Basically it's like compressing gas in a cylinder with a piston. The piston is the falling object, and the sides and bottom of the cylinder are just the air being unable to get out of the way fast enough.
(It's also the same thing that creates the first flaming fireball in the nuke. The shockwave compresses the air so hard, it becomes glowing plasma.)
Now I'm too lazy to search for the speeds at which that happens, but let's just say in layman's terms that's "bloody incredibly fast." We're talking massively hypersonic speeds. It makes the A340 look like a snail by comparison.
An A340 is how tall? 17m? If the falling debris was fallong only at sound speed (340m/s), it would be within the right height band to actually collide for only 0.05s. At flaming debris speeds, make that a couple of milliseconds.
So for the A340 to collide, it would have to cross that 5.75 miles distance not in 38s, but in the above mentioned couple of milliseconds. So, no, that's not close at all.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
As a commercial pilot, I can honestly say that 5 nautical miles is an eternity in an aircraft. In uncontrolled airspace (and even many times in controlled A/S) I routinely close to within 1 nautical mile of other aircraft before either of us becomes aware of eachother. On half a dozen or so times, I've had a "narrow miss" where my flightpath converged to within a few hundred feet of someone else... I've crossed the exact coordinates of other aircraft and would have hit had we not been separated by 1-200 feet of altitude. Trust me, it happens ALL the time in general aviation. If you research midair collisions, you'll find that they are extremely rare.
-If the debris had hit the airplane, what would have changed? It would be an astronomically improbable albeit unlucky event. The passengers have more of a chance of having a catastrophic engine/structural failure. but do we worry about that? Do you read headlines that say "Airliner narrowly misses it's annual inspection, hundreds nearly die as wing nearly falls off"
-Shameful media... that's all. It should have said something like "Passengers get to witness russian satellite burnup"
-And I think that "behind the aircraft" is describing the pilot looking out the side window and noting that the fireball was to the side and behind... say at the 8 O'clock position... more to the side, but still behind and easily seen by the pilot.
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
Generally, you can see a car that's 20 seconds away from hitting you, and plan accordingly. Being able to plan to avoid something takes the fear out of it.
Falling space debris, on the other hand, is not on my priority of stuff to plan for. I imagine it'd be rather hard to see before the collision, too. 30 seconds there makes a lot of difference when you can't plan on it. Just imagining an extra thirty seconds loading the passengers, or sitting on the ramp... suddenly, that 30 seconds doesn't sound like a large safety factor.
Not only that but you guys are all thinking in 2 dimensions. Did the flaming debris actually cross the path of the airliner?? The chances of that happening are incredibly slim. Most likely even IF the airliner reached the debris right at the tiny window (as the previous writer mentioned ~ couple of miliseconds), the debris would most likely have passed along the left or right side of the aircraft. So we're talking about an INCREDIBLY small chance here!
:)
Now the NUMBER of pieces of debris is another question. I can see if thousands of pieces were raining down in the area of the aircraft, the pilot/passengers would have reason to s*** their pants
Okay, so let's not beat up on him too awful much. There are smaller GA aircraft that have rear windows; but most larger GA and commercial aircraft do not. I suspect that a lack of specificity may be the big issue here.
As for seeing behind him, it's not that big of a mystery. He sees the piece in front of him and alerts Center. Center then pays closer attention to him and sees radar targets around him from other pieces.
This is not to say that the article couldn't be wrong or full of it; but is either the article or the parent comment worth everybody jumping on a pile and punching?
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
Do not consider the idea that it might have been a rock from space, because it was NOT a meteor.
It was space junk. It was perfectly normal. It was NOT a meteor. NOT a METEOR.
Space junk is not a meteor, so this particular fire-ball was clearly NOT a meteor.
I repeat, it-was-NOT-a-meteor!
Are you listening? It was NOT a meteor!!!
The Earth is NOT entering a planet decimating cloud of asteroid debris knocked into a lower orbit from the Kuiper Belt by the unignited twin sun which accounts for the weird wobble in all the solar orbits. Do not panic. Keep on buying things. Ignore the severe population control measures being put into place under the guise of fighting terrorism. Or consider. . .
All the new moons observed around our gas giants; The new moon population jumped from single digits to 50 - 80 new moons per gas giant. Many explain this by pointing to our increasingly powerful telescopes. The only problem. . . The new moons were discovered around the furthest to nearest planets in descending order through time, starting with Neptune. Could it be big rocks being caught up by the big gravity sources as the comet cluster heads Sun-ward? Hmm. The Shoemaker-Levy asteroid hit Jupiter in 1994; the most recent evidence from the incoming debris. It is estimated that it can take about 9 years for the bulk of the comet cluster to reach Earth. Which leaves us with just enough time for one more messed up election.
It was not a meteor. But this was.
-FL
...what happened to all those free AOL CDs that I launched into space.
Have gnu, will travel.
If the debris was both in front of and behind the aircraft at the same time, and pilot Heisenberg was uncertain just where it was in the space/time continuum relative to his point of observation, then perhaps all planes should be fitted out with string theory calculators.
Or their weather report should be updated to include expected orbital re-entries.
I think airliners come with those new fangled RADARs nowadays. It probably wouldn't be a problem to not know who or what's behind you if you're the fastest thing in the sky.
A Nautical Mile is equal to 6000 feet or 1828.8 meters.
A Statute Mile ("normal mile") is 5280 feet or 1609.344 meters.
Why there are two miles? I have no idea.
Geez folks, everyone's been dumping garbage in space. Why blame the Russians?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The pilot should have just ice blocked... that's usually what I do when i see a huge fireball coming at my head. /shrug
Russion is like Russion fusion. The satellite was powered by a Russian fusion reactor.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
My car goes 60MPH (for example). If another car crosses the road 38 seconds in front of me, that's 11 football fields away. That's a close call?
Well, I just got an impression that it sounded a little bit hysterical. Only very small bits of the sky are falling - not all of it. But, yes, an interesting story, and cetainly an issue about potential problems caused by all this stuff in orbit.
Here's further justification for the growing concern of the increasing amounts of space garbage orbiting our planet.
:)
Don't you mean space garbage that is de-orbiting our planet?
--fatboy
http://www.deadlikeme.tv/
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Welcome to slashdot.com.au
Look, missing something by several klicks isn't exactly dangerous is it? So what if space junk is falling? Meteors do too - and yet you don't hear about pilots complaining about the dangers of being hit by a meteor do you?
I imagine that even if you could launch every single aeroplane in the world, at the same time, and simultaneously de-orbited every single piece of stuff in orbit (including GSO objects, and even the very distant objects) other than the moon, then the chances of any piece colliding with an airborne plane would still be in the tens-of-millions-to-one-against category.
Stupid media sensationalism at its very worst; nothing to see here folks - move along.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
I listened to the eye-witness report on the radio this morning - the pilot watched the debris fall in front and behind (although presumably out to one side as well). Considering 5 nautical miles is about 30 seconds of flight time, it's entirely conceivable that the pilot was able to estimate the distance based on the relative change of position over such a short period, especially if he had two points of reference to look at.
If it was 50 miles away, there wouldn't be much if any noticable change in the aspect over that time.
BBC is now reporting that the 'flaming debris' was in fact a meteor, and not the remains of a Russian vessel scheduled to re-enter the atmosphere later in the day: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6505143.st m
Sorry they already play in Boston area clubs... just check wikipedia
The Flaming Space Toilets
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Yup.
But with a tiny bit of knowledge it is easy to estimate how far these things are away.
Things in orbit or just coming out of orbit must be typically travelling 5-10 KM per second. So in order for the "junk" to be 5 nautical miles in front of them, it needs to cross 45 degrees of the sky in a single second.
If it's moving much slower than that, it's proportionally further away.
Count to 5 and see how much of the sky it has crossed. The distance it has travelled in those 10 seconds is 30-50 KM or more. Now make an estimate as to how far away it was.
I mean, look at how much stuff the Russians offloaded to the Middle East after the USSR breakup!
I wonder how much a second hand satellite goes for on the black market?
This space for rent
The BBC is reporting (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6505143.s tm) that the Russians didn't bring any objects down until twelve hours after the incident and that a NASA rep is saying "most likely a meteor".
How did the pilot know how far away the debris was?
I would assume that most airline pilot would be better than Joe-average at estimating distances (in the air) correctly.
Except of course, you simply can't tell in the case of falling incandescent debris. What size was the object? What was the size of the plasma? Pilots get meteors wrong all the time. Without further evidence, I claim a mistaken airline pilot, rather than an actual close encounter. I won't cede to "airplane pilot authority".
I probably saw the same one, but from the ground in SW BC. It was like 1 am as I recall. It was pretty cool in an awe inspiring "this is what the end of the world looks like" sort of way.
It was almost right overhead and I would have guessed it was at airliner level. I kept waiting for the sound that never came.
Apparently the initial reports were that it was the Progress cargo capsule recently undocked and de-orbited from the ISS. Space.com is reporting this could not be as that re-entry took place 12 hours after the sighting.
It was most likely a meteor.