Well this seems to be an unusual first, which is also reported today on NBC. Anyone have any rational suggestions? I’m thinking weather balloon or the sort but the dent seems too deep. And do they even still use weather ballons anymore?
“A passenger jet has been forced to make an emergency landing, after an unidentified “foreign object” smashed into its nose cone at 26,000 feet.”
It was the new superman!
Really that’s crazy. I wonder if they saw anything at all.
What altitude range do drones have?
I’ve seen on other forums where people are saying bird strike but I don’t see any blood, guts, or feathers. It clearly looks like a metal on metal hit. Running into a drone is possible.
I’d think it was something relatively soft as the only real paint damage is from the metal folding (edges of the impact area), but there’s no blood and that’s way too high for a bird, I’d think.
A ball of ice perhaps? One that formed higher and gathered material as it fell? That’s a weird one, for sure!
Structural failure of the nose cone.
Now if it was hit by a object only a few more feet up would have been right though the wind shied.
My reasoning is if the air liner is traveling 400 to 550mph and if the object had any speed of motion then the damage would have been much greater. Also I would like to see the radar return for the plane and ground based units as a drone or weather balloon would have been detected either as a collision alert for the plane or a Bogey by the ground based units.
We would also be able to track what hit the airliner after the collision to a general area of the earth were it fell or landed. If the impact truly did occur at 26,000 feet then it is to high for a bird strike do to temp and lack of oxygen and the ice ball hit theory could be possible but improbable do to the fact there would have been more then one strike.
Too high for a bird as we know them is right, but my longtime suspicions regarding the “extinction” of the pterodactyl are looking much more sound as of today.
Birds have been found at jet altitudes before - apparently as high as 37,000 feet in a 1975 collision:
http://askville.amazon.com/highest-ground-bird-fly-flies/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=6813383
There’s also some kind of duck that’s regularly seen at 29,000 feet or more in the Himalayas. Which is sort of not too far from where this incident happened. Crazy as it may sound, a bird strike would be my first guess.
SomeOtherGuy while your post was rather educational this one has simply got to be the right answer. Guess maybe pterodactyls really are gone afterall. 
Rod Serling was right all along. It was this guy:
ETA: Damn DOD site blockers. Sorry, JSantoro.
Not buying it. A collision at altitude, at a 75’s airspeed, with something large enough to dent the nose cone like that, more than likely would have taken the nose cone off or punched a hole in it, since it is a fiberglass type construction to allow for the radar to work. I suspect the collision occurred on the ground at some backwater airport in China, the crew didn’t want to write it up and ground it, then spend a day or two getting it fixed at said shit hole airport, and fabricated this story.
ETW: Umm, has anyone seen Mary Poppins around recently?
Some species of cranes can fly as high as 20,000 feet.
Both the passengers and the crew reported being impacted in flight, then the stability issues arose immediately afterward. By all accounts it seems pretty clear cut in that regard.
If whatever hit it was metal, would they be able to use flight recorders and gps to look for something on the ground? Or would that just cover to large of an area?
I would think ice as well. It looks so clean.
They vary, USAF/CIA/NRO has had UAVs capable of space flight for some time now.
One thing I am not is an Aviation Impact Investigator, however, having seen a bunch of stuff hit in collisions, I would expect to see smearing rearward of the impact. If an impact caused the nose-cone to collapse inward as shown, it would be expected to have enough force to mess up the paint/top layer of the nose-cone. Not seeing that would cause me to believe that the collapse was due to structural failure under the pressure of flight speed air resistance.
I actually know someone who used to investigate this stuff for a living, I’ll throw him a txt.
I wouldnt think bird strike is possible. But at Mach .6-.7, wouldn’t any fluids, feathers, etc. would be swept away pretty easily?