P.s. Here are some links to the spaceweather.com and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory websites archives for the June 1 meteoric events. Also, links to articles on space debris.
http://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=01&month=06&year=2009
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=2009%20KR21;orb=1;cov=0;log=0;cad=1#cad
http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/
http://www.space.com/spacewatch/space_junk.html

If you hit a leading edge on a wing it is (unlike the space shuttle) unlikely to do critical damage.

Striking the top of the wing would likely result in a fuel leak, but the critical hydraulic lines and structural wing spar offer much smaller and better protected targets.

The front of the cockpit might be an especially vulnerable area (assuming the strike takes out both pilots, or happens when only one is in his/her seat), but again, that’s probably just the windows and the area right around them.

The tail surfaces are probably the most vulnerable, though if the assumption is correct that a strike would be head-on, even those should be pretty robust, and again, small targets.

What strikes me as interesting is the idea that aircraft may have already struck smaller meteors and nobody noticed. As an earlier poster mentioned, anything that didn’t penetrate the skin would likely be mistaken for a bird strike, hail, or a foreign object kicked up on a runway. The people reporting and investigating these things likely would have no idea what to look for to spot such an impact.

But I’m pretty sure that such incidents and repairs are maticuliously documented and recorded. and it might be possible for an industrious researcher with better knowledge of meteors to dig through them an spot previously missed impacts (if any).

The Boeing 737 that landed in Hawaii with most of its roof missing is an extreme example of the former. But note that, while the damage there looked (and was) severe, most of the planes critical systems (and a lot of its structure) is in the lower half of the fuselage.

On the other hand, a few metal shavings in rudder actuators have apparently been enough to bring down multiple 737s over the years (obviously this isn’t an example of externally caused damage, but it does demonstrate how a small failure at a critical point can doom an aircraft).

In general, modern aircraft are very robust, and have enough redundancy of critical systems to survive all sort of damage. I suppose you could come up with some sort of “critical damage target area” for any given aircraft, and using this would bring down the likelihood of a meteor-impact loss even farther.

But even that doesn’t take into account the KIND of impact. Speed, area, mass, and the mechanical characteristics of the rock would have to be taken into consideration. A pebble sized rock traveling at a few hundred miles per hour isn’t likely to do much damage unless it hits a particularlly vulnerable area. It might damage a window in a cockpit. It might even cause an engine failure, though such failures are rarely fatal these days.

I suppose it might also damage a fuel tank, but that’s unlikely to be as catastrophic a problem as an earlier poster imagines. Burning jet fuel requires an ignition source and a proper fuel-air mixture, and the flame would have to burn close to the structure of the aircraft before being swept away in the slipstream. Most likely, it would simply result in a fuel leak with out ignition, with all the problems that result from that. Assuming the fuel loss didn’t result in an emergency landing, I’d imagine the pilot would notice the fuel loss and probably run (or vent) the tank dry before landing as a precaution.

A large, slow moving boulder, on the other hand, could do considerable damage no matter where it hit. (So would a dropped piano, for that matter, if Mars were to toss one down as it passes by.)

But when you think about it, it comes back to the same issues as the Hawaii 737. Unless the meteor is very large, or very fast, it is rather less likely to do critical damage, as the most vulnerable systems are mostly on the bottom (structure, landing gear, hydraulics, electrical system) or on the rear (control surfaces). If you punch a hole in the roof, you might depressurize the cabin

I wonder if it could have been a meteor strike, followed by hitting severe turbulence and electrical storms – each individually survivable, but not in combination? From the BBC article (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8087303.stm), the aircraft had at least one problem that it survived that caused loss of radio contact, and it did not crash until many minutes later.

As someone else pointed out, several aircraft could have already have been hit by meteors without people ralizing it was meteors causing the damage.

GAry 7