Summary Hail poses severe safety risks by damaging windshields and hindering visibility for pilots. Radomes can be destroyed by hail, impacting radar capabilities and leading to subsequent issues. Hail causes extensive structural damage to aircraft, compromising aerodynamics and systems.
Hailstorms are more than just a minor inconvenience for aircraft; they represent significant hazards that can compromise safety, cause costly damage, and disrupt operations. Here are five key reasons hail poses such a danger to aircraft and a deeper understanding of hail as a weather event. There have been no reports of injuries onboard.
Understanding hail as a weather phenomenon Hail forms in the updrafts of powerful thunderstorms, particularly within Cumulonimbus clouds, where water droplets are repeatedly lifted into colder regions of the atmosphere. As these droplets freeze and accumulate additional layers of ice, they eventually grow too heavy for the updrafts to support and fall to the ground as hailstones. These ice pellets can range in size from small grains to large stones comparable to golf balls, or even larger in extreme cases.
The hailstones' size and density depend on the updrafts' strength and the duration of their suspension within the cloud. From a meteorological perspective, hailstorms are typically associated with severe weather systems that can produce other dangerous conditions, such as tornadoes and high winds. The unpredictability of hailstorms makes them particularly d.