A plane carrying European royalty had to land due to cracked windshield
An investigation into the incident has been launched.
While modern planes are designed in a way that a windshield crack will almost never compromise the safety of the flight or the people inside, having something like this occur mid-air will usually cause the flight to be diverted as a precaution.
This week, a KLM (AFRAF) plane traveling to Costa Rica from Amsterdam had to make an emergency landing after one was discovered. Aboard the plane was Queen Mathilde of Belgium, who was traveling to the Central American country for a humanitarian mission.
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‘The airplane with Belgian Queen Mathilde landed in Costa Rica with a cracked windshield’
As the plane was already approaching the Costa Rican capital of San José after an 11-hour flight, it did not need to be diverted but was simply cleared to land 15 minutes earlier than scheduled on Feb. 9.
“The airplane with Belgian Queen Mathilde landed in Costa Rica with a cracked windshield,” Wim Dehandschutter, a commentator for the Belgian royal family, wrote on social media platform X.
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Dehandschutter, who was also on the flight to report on the UNICEF mission to Costa Rica, said that he found out what had occurred a few days later after seeing reports of a cracked windshield. The news was later confirmed by KLM.
“Last Sunday, flight KL759 made a priority landing at San José due to a damaged windshield of unknown cause,” the airline said in a media statement. “The safety of passengers and crew was not compromised.”
Passengers scheduled to fly out on the return KL760 flight on the same day were rebooked for a later one. The affected plane was a Boeing 787-9 (BA) Dreamliner used for the airline’s transatlantic routes. Shutterstock
Passengers say they ‘didn’t notice anything’, only found out upon landing
Similarly to several other passengers on the flight who took to social media to describe their experiences, Dehandschutter said that “he didn’t notice anything” and “didn’t receive any notification during the flight or upon landing.”
All windows in a plane are designed to have multiple layers so that a crack in one will not affect the interior and, most importantly, cabin pressure of the plane.
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Queen Mathilde went on to complete her three-day mission to Costa Rica, where she met with President Rodrigo Chavez and organizations working to combat childhood poverty and malnutrtion in the country.
An investigation into what caused the cracked windshield has been launched; KLM has not been commenting on possibilities.
Taking its first flight in 2016, the Boeing 787-9 is nine years old and accumulated 44,002 flight hours during that time. Its last flight back to Amsterdam from the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur had gone without incident.
“Our KLM flight did leave Schiphol 20 minutes late, there was turbulence – as on many flights – and the landing was quite hard, but nothing seemed to be alarming,” Dehandschutter wrote further. “So I was a bit surprised when I read reports in the local media and on X about the ‘emergency landing.’”
With the investigation ongoing, the plane remains grounded in Costa Rica while Queen Mathilde is slated to fly back today on a different aircraft.
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