A rather impressive hail line hit Switzerland this morning including several airfields and ZRH airport.
The cell developed near the lake of Geneva and produced hail of various size throughout the whole path (the grey dots on the pic are reported hail locations).
The result was crazy.
In our area, damage was massive and ZRH airport got away by a hair: The hail hit the runways 14 and 16 north of 28 but the apron stayed unharmed by hail. However, in the populated areas between Aarau and approximately Frauenfeld the damage is tremendous. I had to run errands after the storm and found a whole grocery store parking lot filled with folks whose cars were reduced to scrap, no windows and severe hail damage. My car luckily has no broken windows but also hail damage. Solar arrays on countless roofs have been beaten up severely as well. There are several car dealers around where I live and most of then lost their whole inventory.
Apparently an AN2 at Birrfeld aerodrome got carried away and is severely damaged.
The supercell developed out of the collision of a cold front with a very strong and hot Foehn.
Scary. I hope no one got hurt.
This is why I pay for hangar space when it’s available and there are remote chances that hail or strong winds may occur.
Yeah that’s crazy 😳
One of the hangars at Birrfeld had the doors blown in, causing extensive damage to quite a few aircraft.
The photos are awful, I would post them but need permission from the aircraft owners first.
IO390 wrote:
One of the hangars at Birrfeld had the doors blown in, causing extensive damage to quite a few aircraft.
Oh, which hangar was that? Have not heard anything so I suppose I should be ok but still….
I also saw the Antonv 2 was blown away and damaged there.
@Mooney_Driver it wasn’t your hangar, don’t worry :)
Well, the pictures and videos were dramatic. Luckily our plane wasn‘t affected, but some others basically are scrap metal now. It feels a bit surreal: I was in a commercial flight arriving in Zurich at that time, and all we had was a 20min delay and a wet runway…
It‘s not much in the news over here.
Marcel wrote:
It feels a bit surreal: I was in a commercial flight arriving in Zurich at that time, and all we had was a 20min delay and a wet runway…
The situation at ZRH was surreal. The apron and terminals were not affected but everything just north of the midfield terminal was. A bit more south would have been a total carnage on the apron and dozens of airliners as well as handling material and possibly buildings themselves damaged.
The hail trail covered runways 16 and 14 to about the fire brigade station north of midfield plus the area north of the airport with the villages and cities between Winkel and Bülach, all of which had heavy damage and people hurt. In Bülach as well as Embrach school children were caught in the storm during their break, some outside but the worst inside where a school had kept them in but the window front shattered, so several got nasty cuts from flying glass. The largest hail stones measured were along 7 cm in diameter.
On the airport itself several sensors as well as some cars which were situated in the north were damaged or destroyed. So the airport itself dodged a major bullet but the trail itself was quite extraordinary not only in intensity but also in the area covered. (see the screenshot in the OP). Hail was observed from Lausanne along all the way to Constance, with the highest intensity between Aarau and Winterthur.
Wow! Has there been a similar occurrence in the area before?
