Huge hailstones shatter windscreen of passenger jet

A Delta Airlines flight from Boston to Salt Lake City was hit by huge hailstones which shattered its windscreen and damaged instruments in the nose-cone. One passenger said she had endured the most frightening ten minutes of her life.

Flight 1889 was forced to divert to Denver for an emergency landing after flying through a thunderstorm on Friday, says CNN, with the pilot unable to see out of the front of the plane.

The Airbus A320 was hit by hailstones the size of baseballs, says the Daily Mail. They destroyed the nose cone, taking the plane's GPS unit out of service. It is not known how many people were on board but the A320 can take up to 180.

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Passengers reported seeing hailstones sucked into the engines and blown out of the other side as ice crystals "like a snow-cone machine". The ten minutes of turbulence as they passed through the storm was like a rollercoaster, said some.

After they landed safely, passengers spoke of seeing the damaged nose-cone, completely shattered windscreen and a hole above one engine caused by lightning.

One passenger was taken to hospital with minor injuries. Most were then put on another plane to their destination in Utah but some families requested hire cars to make the eight-hour drive instead.

Passenger Robin Jones told KSTU: "I fly constantly, and this was the scariest ten minutes of my life."

She added: "I thought: OK, have I told everybody that I love that I love them? And as soon as I realised I had done that, I was like: I'm all right. Everything's going to be OK."

Another passenger, Rob Wessman, told KSTU that, after landing, "we went around the corner from the window, we could see the shattered windshield". He added: "We could see the nose of the plane was missing. It was really intense."