A charter plane travelling from London to Orlando, Florida was forced into a hasty U-turn after passengers realised two windowpanes were missing.
A newly released government report showed the Airbus A321 took off from London Stansted without the windowpanes but no one noticed until the aircraft was 14,000 feet in the air.
Passengers were alerted that something was wrong when the cabin started to become “noisier and chillier” than they were used to.
One crew member also noticed the increased noise and spotted that a “window seal was flapping in the airflow and the windowpane appeared to have slipped out.
In the report from the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), the crew described the noise as “loud enough to damage your hearing.”
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Pilots were immediately alerted of the issue and they turned the plane back around to Stansted after 36 minutes in the air.
Once back on land, the crew inspected the aircraft and noticed two windowpanes were missing and a third had been dislodged.
A fourth windowpane was found to be protruding from its designated location.
The investigating team found the only object filling the section the windows were supposed to be in was the scratch pane – a cosmetic piece of plastic used to keep passengers from touching the exterior panes.
The report showed the cabin stayed pressurised normally throughout the short flight.
Investigators found that the missing windows had been removed the day before the plane took off to fit in some lights during a filming session.
They concluded that the windowpanes had sustained “thermal damage and distortion” because of elevated temperature the lights produced during the four-to-five hour shooting.
The lights had been installed to “give the illusion of a sunrise”, according to the AAIB report.
The plane regularly took off the day after the filming carrying nine passengers and 11 crew.
Images taken after the incident showed the deformation around the damaged windowpanes, the agency said.
The AAIB warned the incident could have had “more serious consequences” hadn’t the passengers realised something was amiss.
The report read: “Whereas in this case the damage became apparent at around FL100 (10,000 feet) and the flight was concluded uneventfully, a different level of damage by the same means might have resulted in more serious consequences, especially if window integrity was lost at higher differential pressure.”
