Ah! Bolide is the debunk is it.
Fireballs, bright meteor or bolides [whichever moniker you prefer] are an often cited possible source whenever a pilot [no matter how seasoned] reports a brief encounter with an object that he finds anomalous. But what the 'armchair proposer' [no matter his/her academical qualifications, they invariably weren't there!] and what is infuriatingly obvious is that the proposer all too often has not thought through their proposal with any great vigour at all!
For example, in this case little as it is...the known data eliminates the possibility of the objects witnessed being anything like a bolide incident at all.
Firstly...Did you know that bolides are comparatively a pretty rare sight, in as much as 45,000 have been recorded, but only 1150 have been seen falling, nevertheless they are a well known natural phenomenon , and has been accurately recorded by CNEOS [nasa] for the last 30 years, and if you just take a moment to look at the charts [made by this unsurpassable scientific data collation organisation] then you will quickly see that the slowest bolide on these records is 24,829.9928 mph and the highest recorded is 54,581.2455 mph. And even being forced to labour the point of my original post, the testimony from the highly trained aerial observers ... ie the pilots that were on the spot witnessing the two objects clearly stated that the 'UFO's was travelling at approximately "768 mph". [or mach 2 as you can plainly hear in the tape]
Fireballs
BOLIDES - Visualizing meteorites
Secondly , as can be clearly heard in the tape..."two bright objects bank over to the right, and then climb away at speed"... as witnessed and immediately reported by the crew of three separate airliners.
... and all of the literature that I have read about the characteristics of the meteor, fireball, bolide or whatever, none have ever managed to change course [unaided by striking some other object].... and none have ever performed such a show stopping feat as to "speed up and climb away" after flying parallel to an aircraft!
...and thirdly, as pertaining to the information was already kindly provided by our friend Michael59 ... if the two UFO's reported in the article [and on the live tapes] were somehow to have been 'speed and functional defying bolides' then how come they also managed to evade RADAR detection? .... in the 'evidence against' provided by M59, Bolides show up on RADAR!
Also, the time and duration aspect of the sighting is something that I am less sure of, but nonetheless mindful of the possible downfall of the bolide explanation... insofar as the times of the pilots reporting of the sighting, and the time of the bolide report above in the Hebridean-Atlantic do not match perfectly. I wouldn't normally be quite so pedantic but the synchronicity in a case such as this is far more important than most others, because I cannot find the exact amount of time that the objects were witnesses by the pilots, nor the exact time... but from what I can make out from various news sites reporting the incident , there is an approximate disparity of around three minutes,... and the longest fireball/bolide sighting that I can find on the net is for under 14 seconds.
SatTrackCam Leiden (b)log: OT: the slow, 13.8 second duration earthgrazing fireball over the Netherlands of 28 Nov 2016, 04:40 UT
...and even if the two sightings were of the same objects, who's to say that the two land based witnesses 350 miles away did not mistake the pair of very bright fast moving UFO's that the crews on the three airliners saw a few minutes beforehand for bolides? .... Which consulting the facts of the case would seem far more plausible a scenario.. to me at least.
Reading the Euronews article, it appears that the 'Meteor, Bolide or space junk re-entry' explanation came from a guy named...Dr. Chris Lowe, and described as "a sceptical UFO expert". ... But even he had to add the 'back-covering' codicil of "However, he said aspects of the reports were more unusual. because ...
Cheers.