Flying the meteoric skies

Over at Cosmic Variance, John Conway ponders the idea that a meteor might have taken down the Air France flight that crashed over the Atlantic the other day. John's a physicist, so he goes through the math. You have to make some assumptions, but most of them look solid to me, or at least not crazy. In the end, the odds of any one flight getting hit by a rock substantial enough to do catastrophic damage to a plane is extremely low. That should be obvious, because if the odds were high then we'd see it happen a lot! But over time, the odds of one flight getting hit are just high enough to make a single disaster in the past 20 years just within the realm of possibility. Still, I wonder. When it comes to meteoroids (the solid body that forms the meteor), smaller rocks are more common than ...