Austrian Airlines plane badly damaged in hailstorm

An Austrian Airlines plane was severely damaged when it was caught in a heavy hailstorm during a flight on Sunday afternoon.

The plane, which was flying from Spain to the Austrian capital Vienna, was forced to issue a mayday call and land after hail shattered the cockpit windows and ripped off the front of the aircraft.

Passengers reported that the flight rocked violently throughout the ordeal, with one telling Austrian media that they saw parts of the plane’s destroyed nose flying past.

In a statement to the BBC, Austrian Airlines said the incident occurred when the plane entered a thunderstorm “that was not visible on weather radar.” No passengers were injured in the incident.

Pictures circulating on the Internet showed severe damage to the outside of the Airbus A320. The front nose of the aircraft had been almost completely blown away.

Other photos showed dense white cracks on the windshield.

Emmeley Oakley, a passenger on the flight, told ABC News that the plane was on approach to Vienna when it was suddenly rocked by the storm.

“I think we were about 20 minutes from landing when we hit a hail and thundercloud and the turbulence started,” she told the broadcaster.

She said passengers “could feel the hail” as it hit the plane, adding that the flight was “very turbulent for a minute”. Several people were screaming during the incident, Ms Oakley said. She praised cabin crew who “did a really good job of calming those people down”.

Another passenger, identified only as Manuel H., told the Kronen-Zeitung: “It was only afterwards that I realized that it was parts of the nose of the plane that I saw flying past.”

A spokesman for Austrian Airlines told the BBC that a technical team had been “assigned to assess the specific damage to the aircraft.”

“So far, the hail has damaged the two front cockpit windows, the aircraft nose (radome) and some covers,” the spokesman said.