We flew into a plume of hail during climb-out and OUT OF CLOUDS at about 16'000 feet. T'was daylight too, we never saw a thing. 10 seconds of sheer noise and terror. Paint neatly sandblasted from the nose-cone, no other significant damage. Luckily the MD-80 nosecone was cheap to replace.
Of course, as it was on departure from Catania, our wx-radar was being "spiked" by the equipment of the nearby AF-base, so in the long-standing tradition of proone, i blame the yanks
The point is though, we were clear of the CB tops, as much as we could afford to be while on a terrain-critical SID, and we did not see it coming in daylight, so it's hard to blame AF for hitting that stuff at night.
OTOH, around the same time i was allowed to inspect the nose and windshield of a korean 747 who thought it was a good idea to fly Milan-Zurich without a weather radar on a day with embedded CBs. The windshield was so shot to sh#t that after doing an autoland in ZRH he had to stop on the runway and be towed home....