An Austrian Airlines passenger jet suffered heavy damage flying through a hail storm, pictures have revealed.

The aircraft, an Airbus A320-200, had its nosecone smashed away and its cockpit windows left almost opaque when it was battered by hailstones, pictures show.

The pilots made a Mayday call – an emergency broadcast to air traffic controllers – as a result of the damage, Austrian Airlines said.

Flight number OS434 was between the Spanish island of Palma de Mallorca and Vienna on Sunday June 9 when it encountered a “thunderstorm cell”, the spokesman said.

Technicians are now inspecting the Airbus, which landed safely despite the damage.

The pictures, taken at Vienna Airport, show that the radome, a composite fibre cover that protects the weather radar dish on the nose of the plane, was almost completely torn away.

The hail also badly damaged the pilots’ windows – but did not penetrate their three overlapping layers of specially strengthened plastics.

Airliner windscreens are tested to ensure they don’t break when hit by hail or other hard objects while travelling at speeds of hundreds of miles per hour.

A spokesman for Austrian Airlines said the severe weather was not visible on the aircraft’s weather radar.

Emmeley Oakley, a passenger, told ABC News: “I think we were about 20 minutes from landing when we got into a cloud of hail and thunderstorm, and the turbulence started.”

She told the Australian broadcaster that turbulence caused by the hailstorm lasted for around two minutes, with “phones and cups” flying around the cabin.

“It was a pretty uneventful flight for 90 per cent of the trip,” she added.

In 2017, a pilot was hailed a hero after landing another Airbus that encountered a similar storm.

Captain Alexander Akopov, a Ukrainian, was flying a jet operated by Turkish company Atlasglobal from Istanbul to Erkan, Cyprus, with 127 tourists on board, when he encountered severe storms.

The Atlasglobal jet’s windscreen was left opaque by the impact of hailstones.

Hailstorms do not only damage airliners. In May, hail destroyed substantial parts of French vineyards. Meteo France, the country’s weather forecaster, reported that “petanque boule-sized” hailstones had fallen, destroying swathes of grapevines in the Chablis region.

“The hail tore everything apart. It devastated a good part of the whole vineyard,” said Arnaud Nahan, co-owner of Domaine du Chardonnay.