On Oct. 30, 2025, a JetBlue Airbus A320 dropped about ten stories in seven seconds between Cancun and Newark; 15 people were hospitalized after a diversion to Florida, and all later reached Newark. Airbus blamed solar radiation and issued software updates to roughly 6,000 aircraft, but space-weather experts say solar activity that day was normal and point to cosmic rays as a more plausible cause. Cosmic-ray–induced "bit flips" (single-bit soft errors) can upset modern microelectronics, and while industry patches reduce risk, such random events remain difficult to eliminate entirely.
JetBlue A320 Plunges 10 Stories in 7 Seconds — Experts Point to Cosmic-Ray 'Bit Flip'
Space Particles May Have Caused Airplane TroubleAngel Di Bilio - Getty Images
On October 30, 2025, a JetBlue-operated Airbus A320 flying from Cancun to Newark experienced a sudden loss of altitude of roughly ten stories in about seven seconds after reaching its cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The crew regained control, the aircraft diverted to Florida, and 15 people were taken to hospital; all passengers later reached Newark safely.
Airbus Says Solar Radiation; Experts Disagree
Airbus issued a statement saying the incident resulted from solar radiation "corrupting data critical to the functioning of flight controls," and the manufacturer rolled out software updates to about 6,000 aircraft in the days that followed. While Airbus acted quickly to address a potential vulnerability, some space-weather specialists say the explanation is incomplete.
Cosmic Rays: A Plausible Alternative
Clive Dyer, a space-weather and radiation expert at the University of Surrey, told Space.com that solar radiation levels on October 30 were ordinary and unlikely to produce the reported avionics errors. Instead, Dyer and others point to cosmic rays — high-energy particles from deep space, often generated by distant supernovae — as a more likely cause.
"[Cosmic rays] can interact with modern microelectronics and change the state of a circuit," Dyer said. "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."
What Is a Bit Flip?
A "bit flip" is an unintended change of a single binary digit in memory or logic (a 0 becoming a 1, or vice versa). These are known as soft errors and have been observed since early computing. One frequently cited example involved a Brussels electronic voting anomaly where a candidate inexplicably received 4,096 extra votes — precisely the value that would result if the 13th bit flipped from 0 to 1. Repeated testing failed to reproduce the error, leaving a cosmic-ray–induced bit flip as a plausible explanation.
Other Aviation Cases and Why Altitude Matters
This is not the first time high-energy particles have been suggested as a cause of in-flight anomalies. In 2008, an Airbus A380 experienced a sudden drop en route to Perth, Australia; investigators considered that a high-energy atmospheric particle might have struck a CPU module and produced a soft error, though that theory could not be definitively proven.
At ground level, the atmosphere shields us from most charged particles, but at typical jet cruising altitudes exposure to cosmic radiation is substantially higher. Sources such as The Oxford Scientist estimate radiation exposure at cruising altitude can be roughly 100 times greater than at sea level — a factor that explains why pregnant aircrew sometimes limit flying during early pregnancy.
Industry Response and Ongoing Risk
Manufacturers and airlines use a range of strategies to reduce soft-error risks: redundant systems, error-detecting-and-correcting memory, watchdog timers, and software patches. Airbus’s rapid updates to thousands of aircraft reflect the industry’s layered approach to safety. Still, experts note that single-event upsets caused by energetic particles are inherently stochastic and difficult to eliminate entirely from modern microelectronics.
Bottom Line
The exact root cause of the October 30 event remains formally unresolved in public statements: Airbus points to solar radiation as the trigger, while independent space-weather experts favor cosmic-ray–induced bit flips as a more plausible explanation given the reported space-weather conditions that day. Either way, the incident highlights a real — if rare — vulnerability in complex avionics systems and the continual need for vigilance, testing, and mitigation.
