Aviation incident OPS15IA020

The flight crew's continued flight into a closing gap between areas of thunderstorm activity and their failure to maintain the required lateral separation from the thunderstorms, which resulted in the airplane's encounter with hail and subsequent airplane damage. Contributing to the incident were the company flight dispatcher's failure to provide complete and timely weather information to the flight crew and the Denver air route traffic controller's failure to provide significant pilot weather report information and alert the pilots of existing and worsening hazardous weather along their flight route, as required by Federal Aviation directives, both of which led to the airplane's encounter with hail.