This article was posted 02/09/2010 and is most likely outdated.

Plane being Struck by Lightning
 

 


Subject - Plane being struck by lightning

February 9, 2010
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Plane Being Struck by a Lightning Flash

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The National Weather Service Forecast Office in Pueblo, CO published a video frame showing evidence of the initiation of lightning by an aircraft at relatively low altitude in Japan. To the author’s knowledge, nobody on the plane was injured. It is unknown if the aircraft experienced any damage.

Not until the 1980s was it convincingly demonstrated that the vast majority of lightning strikes to aircraft are initiated by the aircraft, as opposed to the aircraft’s intercepting a discharge already in progress.

Early arguments that aircraft could initiate lightning were based primarily on the many observed cases of lightning strikes to aircraft inside or near clouds that had not previously produced natural lightning. The first scientific evidence that aircraft could and did indeed initiate lightning is discussed in a Progress in Aerospace Sciences article published by M.A. Uman*, V.A. Rakov of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida. Click on the link below to read the article.

Complete Article: The interaction of lightning with airborne vehicles

 

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Comments
  • Current aircraft take advantage of the metal fuselage being a Farraday Cage. It will be interesting to see how the 787 Carbon-Fiber Fuselage holds up. My understanding is that Boeing has embedded a metal mesh in the surface of the aircraft for this reason.

    Eric Stromberg
    Reply to this comment

  • Aircraft in flight are routinely struck by lighting with no damage. This is not a problem.

    Also firing a bullet through an aircraft window at 30,000 feet will not result in a massive decompression causing people to be sucked out of the plane no matter what you saw in the movie “Gold Finger”

    Akdogman
    Reply to this comment


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