American Airlines Flight Diverted After Hailstorm Damages Nose Cone, Shatters Windshield [Photo]

An American Airlines flight, travelling from San Antonio to Phoenix was diverted to El Paso, Texas, on Sunday after it sustained considerable damage due to severely bad weather.

"American Airlines flight 1897, from San Antonio to Phoenix, diverted to El Paso due to damage sustained by weather in flight. The aircraft, an Airbus A319 with 130 passengers and a crew of five, landed safely at 8:03 p.m. MT [9:03 p.m. EDT]. The aircraft is currently being evaluated by our maintenance team. We never want to disrupt our customers' travel plans, and we are sorry for the trouble this caused,” a statement from American Airlines read, Fox News reported.

Photos of the damage taken after the plane landed safely at the El Paso International Airport showed a thoroughly battered nose of the aircraft along with a shattered windscreen.

There were no reports of injuries despite the damage to the plane, the Federal Aviation Agency reported.

According to ABC News, the audio from air traffic control revealed that prior to diverting the plane, the pilots radioed in saying they had “virtually no forward visibility” at the time and their vision was restricted to the side window. The flight tracker showed that the plane was flying over New Mexico when it decided to digress from its scheduled path.

“#AA1897 I'm on this flight that emergency landed. Things were flying. Passengers throwing up. Scariest flight of my life #AmericanAirlines,” a passenger on the flight named Ezra tweeted along with the view from his window after landing at the airport.

Another passenger, Jesus Esparza said the situation inside the cabin was one of chaos when he was two hours into the flight. He said that the passengers noticed lightning in the skies outside after which it felt like the plane was being pelted with hail. At around the 30,000 feet in the air, the aircraft dropped “like a rollercoaster,” Esparza said.

He recalled that at one point during the turbulent journey, he handed over his sick bag to the passenger sitting behind him as the passenger had already used up their bag. "I'm just glad to be on the ground," Ezra said.

All the passengers were accommodated in a different plane and were expected to reach their destination by Sunday night.

Although everyone on Flight 1897 managed to survive unscathed, a cracked windscreen can be really dangerous. Back in May, a pilot flying the Sichuan Airlines was “sucked halfway out” of the cockpit after the windscreen smashed at 32,000 feet.

“There was no warning sign. Suddenly the windscreen just cracked and made a loud bang. The next thing I know my co-pilot had been sucked halfway out of the window,” the co-pilot said at the time, the Telegraph reported. “Everything in the cockpit was floating in the air. Most of the equipment malfunctioned... and I couldn’t hear the radio. The plane was shaking so hard I could not read the gauges.”

However, since the pilot was wearing a seatbelt, he was able to prevent any serious mishaps.