Meteor disrupting air ops...

[NVJims]

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...yndication=rss

Never heard of this happening before.

[Tnelsen]

I am on a engine at the Springer fire, this event grounded our air ops for a short period. We are on night shift so our eyes were looking up for most of the night lol. It supposedly fell in the county next to us. Maybe its that Wildland terrorism that we have been reading about? Stay safe...

[ScottR]

Meteors fall all the time, ones big enough reach the ground, they cannot be predicted, to halt air ops because one was seen seems really stupid,, did they halt other air traffic ? if a bird was seen in the area do they stop flying in fear of a possible air strike ? the odds of hitting a bird are much greater that getting hit by a space rock I would think, has there ever been a plane hit by a meteor ?

[abercrombie]

As I understand it from the article in Shift Briefing, they stopped to see if they could figure out what they had seen. Initially they did not know it was a meteor.

Sounds prudent to me.

[stringtown]

Yes, meteorites enter Earth's atmosphere all the time. They usually break up as they move through the atmosphere at intense speeds, this is the glow that is seen by people and most probably never even make it to Earth's surface. There are meteorites everywhere on Earth, but people don't usually notice them because they are generally small and look like regular rocks- if you know what to look for (like a fusion crust and a rock that contains unusual amounts of iron) they are fairly common in desert areas where they don't undergo very much weathering or get covered up by vegetation. 50% of all meteorites are found in Antarctica where virtually no weathering happens.

I would imagine this is why air resources would be grounded since they usually break up into many small pieces as they fall towards Earth, if they were seen in a couple of different areas then there is the possibility of localized meteor shower with little pieces falling from the sky. Even a small object falling from the sky at thousands of miles per hour can do great damage...but I must say this is new one for me too. Here is a picture of a woman's car who was hit by a meteorite in 1992.

[rmm]

Meteors fall all the time, ones big enough reach the ground, they cannot be predicted, to halt air ops because one was seen seems really stupid,, did they halt other air traffic ? if a bird was seen in the area do they stop flying in fear of a possible air strike ? the odds of hitting a bird are much greater that getting hit by a space rock I would think, has there ever been a plane hit by a meteor ?

I was driving down the highway about 15 years ago when a meteorite hit my windshield. It was a very, very small rock (pea gravel size). It not only broke the windshield, it melted some of the glass on impact. It was one helluva hit!

[Fire Geek]

A meteor once started a raging sand fire in the CA Desert!

[arff]

I seem to remember a lot of concern about the sand fire potential in R5.

[redhat]

There was this one time in band camp