Virgin Atlantic Boeing 787 forced to reroute after windscreen cracks mid-flight at 40k feet
As the flight was forced to turn around, the passengers made their trip to San Francisco the next day
A Virgin Atlantic flight bound for San Francisco was forced to reroute after its windscreen cracked mid-air at 40,000 feet. The Boeing 787-9 aircraft suffered “damage to the outer layer of the cockpit windscreen” nearly three hours after it took off from London’s Heathrow Airport, the company said.
Boeing 787-9 aircraft reroutes after windscreen cracks mid-flight
The incident occurred when the plane did an about-face somewhere between Greenland and Iceland, per NY Post. Reports say the temperature outside was -58 degrees. As the flight was forced to turn around, the passengers made their trip to San Francisco the next day. No injuries were sustained at the time of the incident.
While the cause behind the damage to the May 27 flight was not clear, a spokesperson for Virgin Atlantic said that the aircraft's VS41’s glass, “made of multiple layers,” was “partly cracked.” The spokesperson added that it was a “non-structural, wear-resistant layer.”
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Following the mid-air scare, the airline assured that “at no point was the safety of the aircraft, our customers or our cabin crew compromised,” per the Evening Standard. The statement continued, “The Captain made the decision to return to Heathrow, where we had the replacement parts and tooling in place to fix the issue and avoid further impact to our customers and our schedules.”
“We always work well above industry safety standards and the aircraft was back in service within 24 hours of the event. We’d like to apologise to the customers involved, for the delay to their journeys,” the airline added.
The incident comes amid Boeing's series of mishaps. On Wednesday, a Southwest Airlines' Boeing 787 plane triggered altitude alarms while landing in Oklahoma City as it flew less than 500 feet over a residential neighbourhood. A similar incident took place a month ago when another Southwest aircraft bound for Hawaii dropped to just 400 feet above the Pacific Ocean.