A plane traveling from London in Orlando when he was forced to turn around… The few passengers complained that the cabin was “noisier and colder”.
According to a report from theAir Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), the British body responsible for investigating air accidents in the United Kingdom, the incident occurred on October 6 on a charter flight Airbus A321 connecting the airport London Stansted at the international airport from Orlando. Eleven crew members and nine passengers were on board. After takeoff, several passengers noticed that the cabin seemed “noisier and colder » than they were used to. A crew member also noticed the increased noise in the cabin and noticed that a “window seal was flapping in the airflow and the window seemed to have slipped”.
A crew member described the noise as “loud enough to damage hearing”. After the crew member informed the pilots of the situation, they made the decision to return to London Stansted Airport. In total, the flight took off for 36 minutes and reached a little more than 14,000 feet before landing.
After landing, the flight crew inspected the plane from the outside and found that two exterior windows were missing while a third was dislodged. The cabin was normally pressurized throughout the flight, according to the report. In addition to the missing panes, a fourth window was protruding from where it usually sits.
The agency found an interesting culprit for the missing windows: bright lights used for a filming session involving the plane a day before the flight. According to the AAIB, the windows suffered “thermal damage and deformation”, because several lights caused high temperatures in the area where the glass was located. These lights had been on for four to five and a half hours.
The government agency published various photos in its report.
