Delta Fight 1889 was forced to make an emergency landing after it was caught in a hail storm and hit by lightning.
The Airbus A320 was flying from Boston to Salt Lake City when it had made an emergency landing at the Denver International Airport at 9pm Friday after its windscreen and nose cone were badly damaged by hail. The hail storm also tore the aircraft’s fuselage. The plane landed safely.
It hit bad weather at the Nebraska-Colorado border on Friday night.
“I fly constantly and this was the scariest 10 minutes of my life,” Robin Jones, one of the passengers, told Fox after safely landing in Salt Lake airport. “I thought, ‘OK. Have I told everybody that I love that I love them?’ And as soon as I realized I had done that, I was like, ‘I’m alright. Everything’s going to be OK.’”
There were visible cracks to the cockpit’s windscreen and the aircraft’s nose cone was torn off after hail, bigger than the size of eggs damaged it. Passengers also recall seeing the damage brought about by a lightning strike on one of the plane’s engines.
“We went around the corner from the window, we could see the shattered windshield,” another passenger, Rob Wessman said after assessing the damage of the plane. “We could see kind of a hole over the engine where lightning had struck. We could see the nose of the plane was missing. It was really intense.” He started messaging his wife to inform her about what just happened while people were crying and shaking.
It was reported that the passengers of the Delta flight were flown to Salt Lake City on another plane according to Liz Savadelis, a Delta spokeswoman.
According to a spokesperson from the Denver International Airport, one person was brought to the hospital at their own request.
The FAA will investigate the incident.