How often are aircraft hit by lightning and not damaged, and as dumb as this may sound, is it that big of a deal? I flew into Nashville last night on the backside of a thunderstorm, and while I felt safe (hey, they’re the pros, and besides, the scene outside the windows looked great), it did seem like there was still a fair amount of lightning lingering across the city.
It seems plausible that a conductor traveling across the sky could easily find itself in the path of a strike. And, while I’m sure that commercial planes are designed to withstand lightning strikes, the carriers do go to the extreme of restricting cell phone usage during takeoff and landing. So, are lightning strikes an acceptable risk to commercial aviation, or are they something that everyone tries to avoid at all costs.
Lightning goes from cloud to cloud or from ground to cloud. Since passenger jets usually fly above the clouds, I would WAG that they’re safely out of the way most of the time.
Although rare, it does happen. Sometimes the results are disasterous and sometimes there is hardly any effect at all. I had a reference for this that I’ll post here if I can find it again.
Here is a neato-schmeato page with a video clip of an airliner being struck by lightning on takeoff. The page doesn’t give any details, but IIRC it happened last year in Tokyo, and the plane was able to turn around and return to the airport without incident.
I have no stats, but I’ve actually been in a commercial jet that was indeed struck.
Pretty dramatic bang-and-flash, enough to start some passengers screaming. I’ll admit to a somewhat higher pulse than normal… The palne was in heavy turbulence anyway, so after 10 seconds I realized that we weren’t doing anything dramatic and started relaxing a bit again. The pilot pretty quickly reported that it was a lightning strike and that everything was quite in order, and we continued to our destination. No big deal.
Interestingly enough, on landing the captain gave the usual speech about mobile phones and made sure to add that this time he really meant it, because they played havoc with his diagnostic electronics. And we taxied directly to a workshop hangar, not the terminal.
Commercial aircraft are designed to withstand lightning strikes. Sometimes a lightning strike will be part of a freakish chain of unrelated events that can cause trouble, but most times lightning causes little or no damage. I read of one case recently where lightning struck an aircraft near the copilot’s window. his arm was resting near the window sill at the time and he was temporarily paralyzed on that side (no lasting damage, I think). No trouble other than that, but if the pilot was in the restroom at the time…
The real danger is not the lightning but the wind and hail from the associated thundercloud. These can easily wreck even the largest jumbo jet, so pilots are trained to give them a wide berth. Not a problem en route (by the way, many thunder clouds rise far higher than commercial aircraft fly, so flying over is not an option), but fast-moving thunderstorms near airports play havoc with aircraft trying to take off and land.
The Apollo 12 spacecraft was struck by lightning shortly after liftoff in Florida in 1969. It briefly knocked out some of their instruments, and scared the piss out of them. But they were able to continue their mission normally.
Like everyone’s pointed out, it definitely does happen, and many planes have been vecotred into a cell accidentally, or has descended/ascended into one on landing/takoff. Not much damage results. My plane was struck on the way back from a mission once. On our postflight inspection, we could see a burn mark where the bolt entered… it had exited on one of our antennas, and it had actually sort of exploded. Pretty cool looking. But it cost $10k to replace the thing (you gotta love the military).