An American Airlines plane carrying 130 passengers was forced to make an emergency landing after its windshield cracked in severe weather in what one passenger described as “the scariest flight of my life.”
People on board vomited, and objects were dislodged in the turbulence caused by a hail storm that damaged the plane so badly, the pilot had to abandon the journey.
Flight 1897 from San Antonio to Phoenix was forced to land at El Paso International Airport, in Texas, on Sunday evening after the plane suffered damage caused by the bad weather, the airline said in a statement to KFox14.
Following the emergency landing, the airline’s maintenance team evaluated the damage caused to the plane, though there is no word yet on the extent of the damage caused by the bad weather.
The airline told Reuters that the nose and windshield of the plane had suffered damage from hail but did not elaborate on the plane’s condition, while one passenger, Jesus Esparza, told KENS he could hear the hail lashing the airplane as he sat inside it.
Passengers took to social media following the emergency landing, describing the moment the plane flew through the hail storm that damaged it to the extent that it could not continue on its journey.
“# AA1897 I’m on this flight that emergency landed. Things were flying. Passengers throwing up. Scariest flight of my life # AmericanAirlines,” one passenger tweeted.
After passengers and crew left the aircraft following the emergency landing, shortly after 8 p.m., the passengers were rerouted on another plane to their destination.
Back in April, passengers on board a Southwest Airlines plane reportedly thought they were about to die as the aircraft attempted to land in a storm in New Orleans.
People on Southwest Airlines Flight 3461 even texted their loved ones as the plane attempted a terrifying landing.
“I thought we were going to crash,” WWLTV reporter Lauren Bale, who was a passenger on board the flight, said.
“It was going all over the place. People were screaming, people were crying. The flight attendants were yelling over the speakers to fasten seat belts as tightly as possible and I was texting my family goodbye,” she added in comments published by the U.K. newspaper The Daily Mail. “I just don’t understand why [Southwest Airlines] put everyone in that situation.”
