“It was a pretty uneventful flight for 90 per cent of the trip,” she added.
In 2017, a pilot was hailed a hero after landing another Airbus that encountered a similar storm.
Captain Alexander Akopov, a Ukrainian, was flying a jet operated by Turkish company Atlasglobal from Istanbul to Erkan, Cyprus, with 127 tourists on board, when he encountered severe storms.
The Atlasglobal jet’s windscreen was left opaque by the impact of hailstones.
Hailstorms do not only damage airliners. In May, hail destroyed substantial parts of French vineyards. Meteo France, the country’s weather forecaster, reported that “petanque boule-sized” hailstones had fallen, destroying swathes of grapevines in the Chablis region.
“The hail tore everything apart. It devastated a good part of the whole vineyard,” said Arnaud Nahan, co-owner of Domaine du Chardonnay.