Ireland · 09 November 2018
Airspace off the south-west coast of Ireland, 2018
ReportedIreland's civil aviation regulator formally opened an occurrence investigation on the word of three separate airline captains, and the whole exchange with Shannon control is preserved on air traffic control tape.
- Where
- Airspace off the south-west coast of Ireland, Shannon-controlled
- When
- 09 November 2018
- Who reported it
- 3+ commercial airline flight crews, recorded on Shannon ATC audio
- Entities described
- None reported
- Handled as
- INVESTIGATED / EXPLAINED
- Evidence class
- GOV-1
The record
An official file preserves that a report was made and examined. It does not, by itself, establish what was seen.
UNKNOWN - IAA occurrence reports are not published
No document is attached yet. The retrieval is open work.
What is not settled
The confidential occurrence process is a safety mechanism and its files are not released. The favoured explanation - a meteor or bolide on a low shallow trajectory producing multiple fragments on a common track - fits every reported detail, and the pilots themselves raised meteor activity on the tape. No radar track of a solid object.