Scary: Hail Rips Off Front Of Plane With 179 People On Board

Hail ripped the nose off this plane
and broke the windows on the 
cockpit when this plane encountered
a nasty hailstorm Sunday on
approach to Vienna, Austria. 

An Austrian Air flight with 173 passengers and 6 crew managed to make a safe landing in Vienna, Austria Sunday despite a hailstorm that severely damaged the plane mid air. 

The flight was on approach to Vienna when it encountered the large hail. The hail stones ripped the nose off the plane, turned the cockpit windows into a thick spiderweb of cracks and damaged other parts of the plane. 

The pilot declare a mayday and the plane was cleared for an emergency landing.  Passengers said there was a fair amount of alarm on the plane as the hailstorm also included lots of turbulence. And obviously a lot of noise. 

Airlines usually try to fly around thunderstorms if at all possible, not only because of the hail risk but because storms can cause sharp downdrafts that can cause crashes.  

It's possible the storm developed quickly, but then again you'd think a thunderstorm producing that much hail  would have been noticed. An image from Flight Aware via Fox Weather shows the flight path of the plane superimposed on a weather radar image of central Europe. 

Weather radar showed a line of thunderstorms just south of the Vienna airport with this flight appearing to skirt the western edge of what appears to be a more intense thunderstorm cell. 

According to a statement from Austrian Airlines to CNN:

"Airbus A320 aircraft was damaged buy hail on yesterday's flight OS434 from Palma de Mallorca to Vienna. The aircraft was caught in a thunderstorm cell on approach to Vienna, which according to cockpit crew was not visible on the weather radar."

I hope whatever European version of the National Transportation Safety Board looks into this one to prevent it from happening again.   I used to hear about these airline/hail encounters occasionally, but this is the first time I've seen something like this in the news in quite awhile. 

I'm glad there were no injuries with this one and that the pilots were skilled in landing the plane. Judging by photos of the hail damage, this could have been so much worse.