I read online that a passenger airplane lost its winglet in turbulence while crossing Alabama and had to land early in Birmingham. I was unable to find any news about where the winglet fell and decided to see if I could figure it out from FlightAware’s ADSB data.
When displayed on Google Earth, the track of N233NN looks almost perfectly straight, so I wrote some code to take the long, straight segment across Georgia and Alabama and compare it to a perfect great-circle route. Viewed this way, there is a very sudden 75m deviation to the right followed by a recovery. This seems like it could be consistent with losing a winglet.
If my observation is correct, the winglet most likely fell off between the labeled point and Millerville which corresponds to the maximum deflection on the graph.
I spent half an hour flying over the area and was unable to locate the winglet.
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