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What happens when lightning hits an airplane?

By Karen Hill

If you’ve got a fear of flying and an active imagination, your mind can generate vividly horrifying scenes:

ball lightning rolling down the aisle, shorting out laptops and cell phones, electrocuting passengers, overcooking the chicken It la king, that sort of thing.

It probably doesn’t help to hear that lightning strikes airplanes more often than you might think (in fact, the mere presence of the airplane near highly charged clouds can trigger a lightning bolt).

The good news is that being in a plane struck by lightning isn’t usually a problem. The airplane’s skin is designed to conduct the electricity around the passenger compartment and discharge the energy back into the atmosphere.

If you look, you can see the little rods of the “discharge wicks” on the rear edges of the plane’s tail and wings.

That wasn’t always the case, however. Regulators mandated various protective measures after lightning caused the crash of a 707 in 1963.

Since then, aside from an occasional report of some minor damage to a plane’s electrical systems, lightning hasn’t been implicated in anything like what our imaginations can conjure up.

So next time you’re flying in a storm, blame the overcooked chicken dish on something else.

Related

  • When Lightning Strikes Water Do All the Fish Die and What Happens When Lightning Strikes a Ship at Sea?
  • What Is Ball Lightning, What Causes Ball Lightning, and Where Does the Electrical Phenomenon Come From?
  • Why Does Lightning Fork and Form Branches and How Large Is the Diameter of a Bolt of Lightning?
  • How Many Times Does Lightning Strike Around the World Each Day and How Hot Is a Bolt of Lightning?
  • Can an Airplane Hit an Air Pocket?
  • What Was the Shortest Airplane Flight Around the World?

Filed Under: Science

About Karen Hill

Karen Hill is a freelance writer, editor, and columnist. Born in New York, her work has appeared in the Examiner, Yahoo News, Buzzfeed, among others.

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