21.10.2025
WindBorne says its balloons are compliant with all applicable airspace regulations.
Image of a WindBorne weather balloon. Credit: WindBorne
The mysterious impact of a United Airlines aircraft in flight last week has sparked plenty of theories as to its cause, from space debris to high-flying birds.
However the question of what happened to flight 1093, and its severely damaged front window, appears to be answered in the form of a weather balloon.
“I think this was a WindBorne balloon,” Kai Marshland, co-founder of the weather prediction company WindBorne Systems, told Ars in an email on Monday evening. “We learned about UA1093 and the potential that it was related to one of our balloons at 11 pm PT on Sunday and immediately looked into it. At 6 am PT, we sent our preliminary investigation to both NTSB and FAA, and are working with both of them to investigate further.”
WindBorne is a six-year old company that seeks to both collect weather observations with its fleet of small, affordable weather balloons as well as use that atmospheric data for its proprietary artificial intelligence weather models.
Quelle: X
Online detectives solve the case
Scott Manley, a popular YouTube creator and pilot, was among the first people to speculate online about the collision being caused by a WindBorne balloon, having coordinated the position of a balloon data point with the flight path of the aircraft. Asked about this by Ars, the company confirmed that its balloon likely hit the plane.
The strike occurred Thursday, during a United Airlines flight from Denver to Los Angeles. Images shared on social media showed that one of the two large windows at the front of a 737 MAX aircraft was significantly cracked. Related images also reveal a pilot’s arm that has been cut multiple times by what appear to be small shards of glass.
Speculation built over the weekend after one of the aircraft’s pilots described the object that impacted the aircraft as “space debris.” On Sunday the National Transportation Safety Board confirmed that it is investigating the collision, which did not cause any fatalities. However, one of the pilot’s arms appeared to be cut up by small shards of glass from the windshield.
Balloons said to not “pose a threat”
WindBorne has a fleet of global sounding balloons that fly various vertical profiles around the world, gathering atmospheric data. Each balloon is fairly small, with a mass of 2.6 pounds (1.2 kg), and provides temperature, wind, pressure, and other data about the atmosphere. Such data is useful for establishing initial conditions upon which weather models base their outputs.
Notably, the company has an FAQ on its website (which clearly was written months or years ago, before this incident) that addresses several questions, including: Why don’t WindBorne balloons pose a risk to airplanes?
“The quick answer is our constellation of Global Sounding Balloons (GSBs), which we call WindBorne Atlas, doesn’t pose a threat to airplanes or other objects in the sky. It’s not only highly improbable that a WindBorne balloon could even collide with an aircraft in the first place; but our balloons are so lightweight that they would not cause significant damage.
WindBorne also said that its balloons are compliant with all applicable airspace regulations.
“For example, we maintain active lines of communication with the FAA to ensure our operations satisfy all relevant regulatory requirements,” the company states. “We also provide government partners with direct access to our comprehensive, real-time balloon tracking system via our proprietary software, WindBorne Live.”
Quelle: arsTechnica