British Airways flight suffers freak accident, windscreen smashes at 35,000 feet | World News - Hindustan Times
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British Airways flight suffers freak accident, windscreen smashes at 35,000 feet
Around 200 passengers onboard a British Airways aircraft to London survived a mid-air accident at 35,000 feet after a block of ice from a jet flying about 1,000 feet above it smashed onto the windscreen of the plane and left it cracked, media reports stated.
Flight BA2236 was in the skies with holiday travellers from London's Gatwick international airport to San Jose in Costa Rica on Christmas Day when the freak incident happened.
The block of ice shattered the two-inch-thick windscreen, which is nearly bulletproof to withstand extreme force. However, the aircraft landed safely at San Jose.
The incident has been described as ‘one-in-a-million’ that landed with all onboard safe but left the passengers stranded over Christmas as they could not make it back to London on the same flight.
Two such passengers, Jo Mitchell and Geir Olafsson, were on honeymoon in Costa Rica. They had set off from their Pacific coast resort to return to Edinburgh via Gatwick to meet family for Christmas.
“My husband is part-Icelandic and his family who live in Edinburgh celebrate Christmas on 24 December. We were desperately trying to find a connecting flight at this point that would get us there in time to not miss his family Christmas,” Mitchell told British newspaper The Independent.
According to them, the BA app was saying showing a vague status about the flight being delayed to the next day.
"The flight time, however, only showed a four-hour delay. We had received no information via email or message so we hoped it was just a glitch. We dropped our car and continued to the airport, desperately hoping it wasn’t true,” Mitchell said.
The flight was rescheduled 50 hours after the original departure time.
“At this point we were devastated – realising we would miss Christmas with both of our families,” Mitchell noted.
British Airways later issued an apology to the passengers who had to cancel their Christmas Day plans because of the incident.
“We will never fly an aircraft unless we feel it is completely safe to do so, and on this occasion, our engineers were unable to clear it to fly. Since then, our teams have been working behind the scenes to do all they can to ensure an aircraft is ready at the earliest opportunity to bring customers to London,” British Airways officials said as quoted by The Independent.
“We appreciate the patience and the understanding of our customers and our engineers and crew colleagues who have also done all they can to assist,” the official was quoted as saying.
British Airways offered a full refund to all the affected passengers, and an additional 520 pounds per person stipulated for long delays under air passengers’ rights rules, the report said.
(With Agency inputs)
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