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A number of approaches have been used to improve the impact damage resistance and tolerance of composite materials. These include control of fibre/matrix interfacial adhesion, laminate design and through the thickness reinforcement. One of the techniques of arresting delamination is providing through-the-thickness reinforcement like stitching. The objective of this work is to understand the influence of fibre orientation and stitching on the mechanical response of the laminate. In this paper, the drop weight impact properties and mode I interlaminar fracture toughness of stitched and unstitched glass fibre epoxy laminate are were studied experimentally. The ultrasonic C-Scan image of the damaged impact specimen is used to find the damage area. A detailed comparison between the stitched and unstitched laminates experimentally confirmed that the stitching effectively suppressed the out of plane impact damage and increased the interlaminar fracture toughness. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection arid/or peer-review under responsibility of Noorul Islam Centre for Higher Education