Flying through a thunderstorm can be a scary experience even for the most experienced travelers. There’s a number of risks with doing so, and passengers aboard an Austrian Airlines flight on June 9 learned that firsthand.

The flight was traveling to Vienna from Palma de Mallorca in Spain when, according to the airline, the plane was badly damaged by hail when it flew through a “thunderstorm cell,” per CNN. It resulted in much more than just turbulence, as the plane was pelted with hail that broke windows and knocked pieces of the plane clean off.

Miraculously, the plane landed safely in Vienna less than half an hour later, but it wasn’t until the 173 passengers deplaned that they realized just how bad it was. Most of the plane’s nose was missing entirely, while the top of the cockpit was bent and the cockpit windows were cracked.

It was a scary and entirely unintended incident, as the storm “was not visible on weather radar,” the airline told CNN. “According to current information, the two front cockpit windows of the aircraft, the nose of the aircraft [the ‘radome’], and some paneling were damaged by the hail,” they said.

A passenger on the flight described the scene aboard the aircraft to 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,” Emmeley Oakley said. “We could definitely feel the hail coming down on the plane and it was quite loud and of course super rocky for a minute.”

Some people started screaming, prompting the flight attendants to spring into action and calm everybody down. “It was a pretty uneventful flight for 90 percent of the trip,” Oakley said. “It wasn’t until we exited that we saw the nose was missing! The pilots really did an excellent job keeping things as smooth and safe as they could.”

It was certainly an unforgettable experience that could’ve been much worse.