Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

  • A recent passenger flight of a JetBlue-operated Airbus A320 experienced an unexplained drop in altitude, injuring 15 passengers onboard.

  • The company says solar radiation caused the equipment malfunction, but space weather experts suggest a more likely culprit is cosmic rays produced from some far-flung supernova.

  • Cosmic rays are known to produce soft errors, known as bit flips, which turn a bit from a one to a zero (or vice versa) unintentionally.

On October 30, 2025, a JetBlue passenger jet was making its way from Cancun, Mexico, to Newark, New Jersey, when after reaching cruising altitude at 35,000 feet, it suddenly dropped precipitously. Although the pilots regained control of the aircraft, the flight landed in Florida, where 15 people were taken to the hospital. Thankfully, everyone eventually arrived in Newark alive and well.

However, what exactly occurred over the Gulf of Mexico remained a mystery—that is, until around a month later, when Airbus (the makers of the A320 in question) released a statement saying that the cause of this mishap was due to solar radiation “corrupt[ing] data critical to the functioning of flight controls.” A couple of days later, Airbus announced that around 6,000 of its aircraft received updates to address this problem. Mystery solved, right?

Well, not so fast.

Speaking with Space.com, Clive Dyer—a space weather and radiation expert at the University of Surrey in the U.K.—said that on October 30, solar radiation levels were normal and nowhere near impactful enough to mess with avionics. Instead, Dyer thinks another invisible reason may be to blame: cosmic rays.

“[Cosmic rays] can interact with modern microelectronics and change the state of a circuit,” Dyer told Space.com. “They can cause a simple bit flip, like a 0 to 1 or 1 to 0. They can mess up information and make things go wrong. But they can cause hardware failures too, when they induce a current in an electronic device and burn it out.”

The unintentional change of a bit zero to a one (or vice versa) is known as a “bit flip,” and it’s a phenomenon that dates back to early days of the computer age. One of the most famous examples of cosmic rays wreaking havoc on terrestrial electronics is during an election in Brussels, when a little-known politician from Schaerbeek received more electronic votes than was possible—4,096 added votes, to be precise. This is a suspicious number because it’s the exact amount that would appear if the 13th bit flipped from zero to a one. After testing and re-testing the voting system, the error wasn’t reproducible, suggesting that perhaps cosmic rays were the culprit.

This isn’t even the first time cosmic rays may have impacted air travel. In 2008, an Airbus A380 similarly dropped suddenly on its way to Perth, Australia. After investigating several possible explanations, one plausible theory was that a high-energy atmospheric particle struck the CPU module. But because this was a soft error, it’s impossible to know for sure if this was the cause.

Typically, the Earth shields us from these harmful high-energy charged particles, but at the cruising altitudes of aircraft, things are a little bit different. According to the Oxford Scientist, exposure to cosmic rays increases 100-fold at cruising altitude (compared to sea level). Pregnant pilots or aircrew will also typically refrain from flying during their first trimester, due in part to this increased exposure to radiation.

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