Hail smashed in the nose and seriously damaged the windshield of a Delta Airlines flight on Friday, forcing the pilots to divert the flight.
Images posted to Twitter showed that the nose cone, which houses the plane's radar, had almost entirely collapsed and the paint had been shredded off. The windshield also appeared to have been shattered. The flight was on its way to Salt Lake City from Boston when it was caught in a storm.
The plane, Delta flight 1889, an Airbus A320, ended up making an emergency landing at Denver International Airport despite major visibility issues for the pilots due to the damaged windshield.
#Delta should give the pilot of my flight a sizable bonus for saving our butts. pic.twitter.com/O5EntnI5A2— Beau Sorensen (@sorrogrande) August 8, 2015
Stu Ostro, a senior meteorologist at the Weather Channel, said that the flight had apparently attempted to fly between two separate storms but ended up caught in some of the most severe hail when the systems merged.
Radar w/loc. (from http://t.co/PBNa4qzwyF) of plane diverted by #hail http://t.co/ikDOnrbuKT https://t.co/xBimMQ4TVw pic.twitter.com/fDHxn0Hh06— Stu Ostro (@StuOstro) August 8, 2015
Some passengers held hands and cried as the plane endured bad turbulence, ABC News reported. No passengers were injured but one was transported to a hospital upon request.
Hail damage to my plane while flying from Boston to Salt Lake. Emergency landing in Denver. #DL1889 #Delta1889 pic.twitter.com/HGQuCwHOK1— Jeff Johnson (@jwjohnson99) August 8, 2015
Pilots normally fly around thunderstorms, sometimes deviating course by hundreds of miles in order to avoid the severe turbulence and hail. In this case, the flight was suddenly caught in an area where a new storm was rapidly developing as the storm systems merged. Weather radar does not warn of storms to come, only of storms that have already formed.
This was the second Delta aircraft to be seriously damaged in flight by hail in the past few months. In May, a Delta flight from Detroit to Seoul was denied permission from Chinese air traffic controllers to change course around a thunderstorm, and incurred major damage from large hail. That plane, a Boeing 747, also had its nosecone dented. The 747 was subsequently written off and sold for spare parts.