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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."

1 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" :-).