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Giant Hailstones Can Spoil Your Flight

Posted by michael on from the keep-seat-belt-fastened-while-seated dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The BBC has the story and picture of an Airbus 312 jet which flew through a giant-hail storm and was left with serious damage."

2 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Hey, who's flying this thing? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Or maybe they were watching the stormscope and not the radar, since a stormscope is a spherics device and only detects electrical discharges associated with lightning and is thus totally blind to rain, hail, or other forms of precipitation. If you are into this sort of this, this month's copy of AOPA Pilot has a column that discusses a similar incident involving an AirTran DC9. That aircraft lost the radome (it departed the aircaft, as opposed to being severely dented as happened to the Airbus).

    Or maybe the flight attendant from west Texas didn't like the pilot and told him to "Go to hail" :-).

  2. Radom damage by Murphy(c) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Just a quick note, that the damage seen on the picture from the BBC-News page, depicts a fairly large hole, our "inset" into the radom (nose cone) of the aircraft.

    Now you have to remember that this part of the aircraft is probably the most fragile as it is not made out of steel or aluminium but rather carbon-epoxy (because it houses the plane's radar, and radar energy doesn't pass thru metal all that good).
    Also the radom is not pressurised and a plane can easily fly without it nor, the radar it portects.

    That being said, I cannot comment on the other impacts or their severity.

    P.S. But as another poster said above, Why the hell did they fly into a thunder/hail storm in the first place is beyound me. "Cumulo Nimbus" (the big anvil shaped thunder storm clouds) are the first thing any pilote learns never to go near.

    Murphy(c)