A flight from London to Orlando took an unexpected turn when the crew of an Airbus A321 decided to turn around mid-flight due to two missing windows, causing quite a scare among the passengers.
On October 4, an Airbus A321 operated by Titan Airways, serving the luxury travel company TCS World Travel, had to turn back at an altitude of 3,000 meters after the crew heard a disturbing noise. the hearing of passengers. The investigation carried out by the authorities revealed that portholes had been damaged by projectors during the filming of a film, which was actually quite funny.
The exterior window as the only protection for passengers
The flight, which was carrying around twenty people, more precisely three pilots, a loadmaster, a mechanic, six cabin crew members and nine passengers, quickly took a critical turn when the loadmaster reported an alarming noise.
The UK’s Air Accident Investigation Branch (AAIB) reported that a window seal was ” toss around under the effect of the air flow », forcing the crew to make the decision to turn around, barely 36 minutes after takeoff.
Once back at London Stansted Airport, the team discovered that the outer panes of two portholes and their rubber seals were missing. In the end, all that was left was the scratch-resistant glass and a piece of plastic to protect the exterior window, in other words to prevent travelers from touching the exterior windows.
Spotlights and filming that could have caused drama
A tragedy seems to have been narrowly avoided. The AAIB stressed that the incident could have had much more serious consequences if the plane had gone even higher, as it would have caused a potentially dangerous depressurization. The people on board could have lost consciousness, had that been the case.
The authority’s report also indicates that the portholes suffered ” thermal damage and deformation », attributed to projectors positioned too close to the plane during a film shoot, the day before the flight.
These searchlights, turned on for more than five hours and directed towards the aircraft, simply weakened the glass elements of the A321, with their power. This is an incident that highlights the need to take adequate precautions during such events, even when they are innocuous, to avoid potentially catastrophic complications in flight.
Source : The Independent
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