THIS WEEK IN 1992: House hit by lump of falling ice from the sky on a sunny day

Caretaker David Bell had been working in his Portchester garden shortly before a hand-sized piece of ice, thought to have been from an aircraft, hurtled out of the sky, smashed his roof, and landed on the lawn.

The Civil Aviation Authority planned to try to track down which plane was overhead at the time and find out what caused the incident.

Mr Bell, 53, had ‘popped out’ to pick up his car and returned to find the turquoise-tinted ice block sitting on his lawn having crashed on to his White Hart Lane home.

It had broken a number of tiles on the roof and some tile fragments were strewn on the patio.

A spokesman for the Civil Aviation Authority said: ‘We do our best whenever this does occur to track down the aircraft responsible to examine it and see if there is a particular problem which needs to be investigated.’

Falling ice from an aircraft usually came from one of two sources.

It could be from either a build up of ice on the aircraft’s wings or fuselage or from a leaking valve in the toilets or the galley.