As you read this story, you will learn the following:
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Recently, an Airbus A320 operated by JetBlue Airways experienced an unexplained descent in altitude, resulting in injuries to 15 passengers on board.
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The company said solar radiation caused the equipment malfunction, but space weather experts believe the more likely culprit is cosmic rays produced by some distant supernova.
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Cosmic rays are known to produce soft errors, called bit flips, which inadvertently change a bit from a 1 to a 0 (and vice versa).
On October 30, 2025, a JetBlue passenger plane flying from Cancun, Mexico to Newark, New Jersey, suddenly dropped sharply after reaching a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. Although the pilot regained control of the plane, the plane landed in Florida and 15 people were taken to the hospital. Thankfully, everyone eventually made it to Newark safe and sound.
However, what exactly happened over the Gulf of Mexico remained a mystery – until about a month later, when Airbus (the manufacturer of the A320 in question) issued a statement saying that the cause of the accident was “corrosion” from solar radiation.[ing] Data critical to flight control functions. A few days later, Airbus announced that some 6,000 of its aircraft had received an update that addressed the issue. Mystery solved, right?
Well, not so fast.
talk with Space NetworkClive Dale, a space weather and radiation expert at the University of Surrey in the UK, said that on October 30, solar radiation levels were normal and far from enough to disrupt avionics. Instead, Dyer thinks another unseen cause may be to blame: cosmic rays.
“[Cosmic rays] Dell told Space.com, “They can interact with modern microelectronics and change the state of a circuit. They can cause simple bit flips, such as 0 to 1 or 1 to 0. They can mess up information and make things go wrong. But they can also cause hardware failures when they induce currents in electronic devices and burn them out.”
Unintentionally changing bit 0 to 1 (or vice versa) is known as “bit flipping”, a phenomenon that dates back to to the early computer age. One of the most famous examples of cosmic rays wreaking havoc on terrestrial electronics occurred during an election in Brussels, when a little-known politician from Schaerbeek received more electronic votes than expected—4,096 more votes, to be precise. This is a suspicious number because if 13th Bit flips from zero to one. After testing and retesting the voting system, the error could not be reproduced, suggesting that cosmic rays may be the culprit.
This isn’t even the first time cosmic rays have impacted air travel. In 2008, an Airbus A380 suffered a similar crash while flying to Perth, Australia. After researching several possible explanations, one theory that seemed reasonable was that high-energy atmospheric particles hit the CPU module. But since this is a soft error, there’s no way to tell if that’s the cause.
Normally, the Earth protects us from these harmful high-energy charged particles, but at the cruising altitude of an airplane, the situation is slightly different. According to Oxford Scientists, exposure to cosmic rays is 100 times greater at cruising altitude (compared to sea level). Pregnant pilots or crew members also typically avoid flying during the first trimester of pregnancy, in part due to increased radiation exposure.
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