A plane which had two of its windows missing took off from Stansted Airport in the United Kingdom and reached an altitude of 15,000 feet before anybody noticed.
The Airbus A321 aircraft returned to the Essex airport last month, according to the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), after a crew member identified the problem early in the flight.
Upon examination, it was discovered that two of the cabin windowpanes were missing and the remaining two were misaligned.
The only item occupying the empty space between the missing windowpanes was the scratch pane, a decorative piece of plastic meant to keep passengers from touching the outer panes.
The aircraft is utilized by luxury travel business TCS World Travel, based in the United States, and is operated by Titan Airways.
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The plane took out for the positioning flight to Orlando, Florida, on October 4 with 11 crew members and nine passengers, all of whom were tour or aircraft operator personnel, according to the investigation.
The passengers were seated in the plane’s centre.
The seal around one of the windows was ‘flapping’ after take-off and the seatbelt signs were turned off, according to the AAIB.
He informed the crew, who chose to return the plane to Stansted, where it landed safely.
During the flight, it reached an altitude of 14,500 feet.
According to the AAIB, “the cabin had remained pressurised normally.”
Upon examining the vicinity of the broken or absent windows, it was discovered that the foam intended to secure them had either vanished or melted as a result of the elevated temperatures.
According to the AAIB, the broken windowpanes were “deformed and shrunk.”
In conclusion, the report said: “Whereas in this case, the damage became apparent at around FL100 (10,000 feet) and the flight was concluded uneventfully, a different level of damage by the same means might have resulted in more serious consequences, especially if window integrity was lost at higher differential pressure.”