Talk about an instrument landing...

Delta flight makes emergency landing after freak hail storm

A Delta flight bound for Salt Lake City was forced to make an emergency landing after a freak, severe hail storm destroyed the jetliner's windshield and pounded away its nose cone, authorities said.

GT

 

Yeah, that does not look like fun!

This is a good blog post talking about the weather they encountered:

Stu Ostro's Meteorology Blog : Meteorological analysis of flight diverted by hail damage | Weather Underground

It's always dangerous to try to shoot the gap between storms-- the problem is that they are always changing and developing.

 

A good analysis. It looks like if they had flown a bit further north they would have avoided the hail, but things were changing quickly, and of course hindsight is always 20/20.

By the way, the aircraft was an A320.

 

I was just talking about this today with a couple Delta pilots I work with.... they weren't particularly impressed with their colleagues decision on this one.

 

I would be worried about the engines. Wonder if these have ice impact trays inboard / aft of the inlet guide vanes like some smaller engines do.

 

Since it was an ex-Northwest aircraft, can we assume that they were ex-Northwest pilots?

 

No. The 747 NW and 777 Delta were fenced for 5 years. In other words only NW guys could fly the whale and only Delta could fly the 777. All other aircraft were open to everyone right away, and the fences recently went away.

 

How much is hindsight though?

Cheers,
Ian

 

Mark, what were the alternatives when they had no vision out of the windshield?

 

Some of it is hindsight..... But they also made a bad choice taking the risk trying to pick their way through some ugly storms and that is born out in the damage to the aircraft. It's not as if they didn't have weather radar to see the storms.

The decision to try and shoot the gap through the storms to start with.... After that they did what they had to do and as you note there wasn't much alternative.

 

Interesting looking at the photo, that there arent any other leading edge damage areas. the leading wing edge, engine cowling, top fuselage, etc all look totally fine. is the air push in front of those surfaces so much to divert the hail or is something else going on? Just seemed strange.
Aerodynamics experts please chime in.

 

I'm not an expert but i do know that the materials in the leading edges of the wings and nacelles intakes are pretty thick stretch formed metal. They are designed to tolerate aerodynamic loads without any deformation. Also, the acute angle of the surface would deflect the hail.

 

and that front radome is pushed in so far I wonder if the forward radar had any movement and range at all..we used to lose an inch or more on props in heavy hail starting at the de ice boots.. and out...and they were terribly out of balance..

 

My flight instructor told me to never fly inside of T-storms .

 

Thanks, I was referring to the landing more than making the decision to shoot the gap. Nothing like getting the door slammed on you.

 

So I have a bunch of friends down with the Hurricane Hunters in Mississippi..... They don't even fly through thunderstorms on the way to a hurricane.

It is a credit that they salvaged the situation as best possible.

 

Autoland. It didn't look like the radome was deformed enough to damage the glide slope antennas.

 

Yeah...I think there's a flight crew in some hot water over this one.

 

I know that they used autoland and I wondered why there was criticism at that...not thinking about the weather mistake.

 

The left and right windows didn't appear to be damaged. Would that give a pilot enough of a ground reference to land?

GT