Flight hit by Lightning and diverted - Looking for feeds

[djkoell]

I was on UAL2447 from Austin to Denver on Sunday, 5/25, and we ended up diverting to Houston after a couple lightning strikes took out the plane's radar.  Took off from AUS at 18:58 local and headed straight towards Denver.  Plane was hit around 19:28 local over South Bend, TX.   You can see we start to turn east for a bit and ultimately divert to Houston.  I tried listening to the two ZFW sectors (42 and 25) on the site, but neither seem to include our flight.  ANy tricks or tips to find which feed my flight would have been on?  I was able to hear the take off in Austin using the 5/25 23:30-24:00 archive file. I know the archive files would need to be on 5/26 with 0000-0030 zulu local.  Thanks

[RonR]

It looks like your flight was cruising along at 36000 feet when the lightning strike occurred somewhere between Abilene and DFW.  LiveATC has very limited coverage of Fort Worth Center (the facility they were talking to at the time) and, unfortunately, there is no coverage for the high-altitude sectors you were in at the time and that means there's no archived audio available.  You might be able to find some audio from your descent into Houston.  I had a look at the approach feed for KIAH but oddly, didn't hear any mention of your flight.  Your flight landed on runway 8R and you can hear the controller talking to your flight crew but the flight crew could not be heard.  They may have been on a discrete frequency that KIAH uses for emergencies.  Your flight did declare an emergency and you were met by emergency vehicles when you landed.  Sorry, not much audio to be found

[djkoell]

Thanks for checking.  I did hear the tower discussions but I missed to communications about declaring an emergency.  I was watching the squawk code on FR24 during the flight and told the person next to me it was a big nothing burger as long as they didn't change the squawk code to 7700.  You can obviously tell I'm not a pilot, but do they change the squawk code to 7700 anytime they declare?

[RonR]

They probably declared the emergency while at cruising altitude and typically, they should be squawking 7700 also but as you mentioned, they appeared not to do that.  It's also possible that the emergency was declared not because of the lightning strike, but because your flight may have been overweight on landing.  There was still plenty of fuel on board to take you all the way to Denver and the fuel is weight that normally would have been burned off by the time you got to Denver.  But since it wasn't burned off, the extra weight may have made it an overweight landing.  Can't be sure though because there's no audio to confirm it.  Hope this helps

[djkoell]

Thank you @RonR!

[RonR]

No problem