All passengers and crew safely deboarded the aircraft as the flight made an emergency landing at San Jose airport.
British Airways aircraft to London
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 said.
Flight BA2236 was in flying with holiday travelers 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 in 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 arranged 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 lives 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,”
According to them, the BA app was saying showing a vague status about the flight being postponed 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 told.
The flight was rescheduled 50 hours after the original departure time.
“At this point, we were devastated – realizing 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.
British Airways officials expressed
Since then, our teams have been working after 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 expressed as quoted.
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“We appreciate the patience and the knowledge 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 complete repayment to all the affected passengers, and an additional 520 pounds per person stipulated for long delays under air passengers’ rights rules, the statement revealed.
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