Plane Being Struck by a Lightning Flash

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