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The Spanish air navigation manager, Enaire, imposed strict restrictions to close the airspace in the whole of northern Spain this morning, Friday November 4, due to the reentry into the earth’s atmosphere of an out-of-control Chinese rocket.

 

The airports of Catalonia, especially Barcelona’s El Prat airport, plus airports in the Balearic Islands, Aragón and Navarra suspended all operations – both departures and arrivals –between 9.38am and 10.38am due to fears the rocket might fly into the flight path of one of the planes, or worse yet fall on an urban area in Spanish territory.

 

 

In the end, the rocket finally fell without incident in an area of the South Pacific at 11.01am Spanish time, as confirmed by the U.S. Army Air Force Space Command.

 

Sources from the air traffic manager Enaire have indicated that the interruption of air traffic during this hour has caused delays in the affected flights of an average of 30 minutes, which in most cases is not enough for passengers to be able to request a refund or compensation from the airline.

 

Spanish airport operator, Aena, has reported that there have been no flight cancellations but there have been delays: of the 5,484 scheduled flights during that one hour that the airspace was closed, 300 were delayed, 157 of them at Barcelona-El Prat airport and around 30 more in the Balearic Islands.

 

But during the incident, there was panic that the outcome could have been much, much worse than a mere 30-minute flight delay. With debris from the Chinese space object CZ-5B, which was 30 metres across and weighed 23 tonnes, in descending orbit and crossing national Spanish territory, Enaire was forced to follow the recommendations of the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and the guidelines of the inter-ministerial cell led by the Department of Homeland Security to establish an airspace exclusion strip of 100 kilometres on both sides of the orbit of the space object to guarantee safety.

 

CZ-5B is the code for the Chinese Long March 5B rocket launched on October 31 from the Wenchang Space Launch Centre (Hainan, China).

 

The trajectory of the rocket crossed the entire Iberian peninsula, a total of 1,200 kilometres, from the north of Portugal, passing 80 kilometres north of Madrid and leaving Spanish territory through Catalonia.

 

Even after the air traffic alert was deactivated, though, it took around three hours to recover total normality in traffic in terms of delays.

 

According to Alberto Fernández Soto, a researcher at the Institute of Physics of Cantabria (CSIC-UC), China usually trusts that its space junk will land in unpopulated areas of the planet, since this is the most likely possibility given that most of the Earth’s surface is water. The US, on the other hand, reserves a little bit of fuel for its space debris in order to guide it away from populated areas, just in case.

 

 

Image: @controladores / Twitter