A Dulles-bound United Airlines flight was forced to make an emergency landing?after a hailstorm left the windshield cracked.
United Flight 349 was headed from Chicago to Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Virginia, when it had to turn around, the airline said.?
The airline said,?operations team reported that the windshield of the plane was cracked as it went through a hailstorm.
As CBS 2¡¯s Charlie De Mar reported Monday night, a passenger who was onboard said not only was it the worst turbulence he'd ever experienced, but he added that flight attendants onboard also expressed the same thing.
Alex Lang, a passenger on the flight, tweeted a photo of the front windshield of the airliner, an Airbus A320, showing it cracked on its left side.
"We flew through a hailstorm for some reason and it cracked the entire windshield," he tweeted.
The plane landed safely, and passengers were able to start their journey over again on a new plane, the airline said in a statement. United declined to answer questions about the weather or why the pilot might have flown into a storm.?It referred questions about the damaged windshield to Airbus.
Lang told Chicago radio station WBBM that the trouble started shortly after takeoff, describing the plane being subject to a four-minute barrage of hail.
"It was loud," he said. "It was just big pieces of hail hitting sheet metal pretty much."
In 2018, an American Airlines jet had to make an emergency landing in El Paso, Texas, after flying into a storm, Reuters reported. A Delta flight was involved in a similar incident in 2015, according to the BBC.??