Three Strikes For Captain Sparky

Whether you're superstitious or 'just a little stitious,' a few choice words can cast a jinx

It was one of those really challenging weather days in the southeast. We were flying in and out of Atlanta, and a massive weather system had the region covered in cloud, and there were embedded cumulonimbus lurking all about. This Saturday morning in April saw me paired with a fairly young check airman as the captain, and we were having a pretty great trip in spite of the weather we faced that day. The trip was supposed to end with a quick round-trip to Newport News, Virginia, and we’d be back home to sleep in our own beds that night – an airline pilot’s favorite layover.

We joked that the CRJ-200’s weather radar was solar powered – when the sun went down or you were in the clouds it really became useless at times, but we were flying the mighty CRJ-700 this day and there is a definite possibility that we had more than a little misplaced faith in the equipment as we took off from Atlanta, took a vector for weather and proceeded to not make it over any waypoints on our route for the rest of the flight until we joined the localizer to land. In cruise, we were deviating left and right around buildups we could see in the occasional breaks where we were on top of the clouds, and when we were in the soup, we tried to keep a safe distance from the build-ups the radar painted, but as the flight went on, the screen faded from distinct buildups to a general screen of mostly green, and guessing where the strong cells was a hunch as often as not.

The captain and I were debating the combination of hunches and weak radar returns, combined with Washington Center’s advice on where the big stuff might lie in wait for us. There were more than a few moments where static overpowered our radios, and Saint Elmo’s Fire danced on the windshield wipers. “We’re about ripe for a lightning strike,” I muttered, mostly unaware I still had the microphone keyed up for the intercom.

The captain immediately replied “Oh, well I’ve never been struck by lightning before!”

Then he and I both dropped our heads a little and exchanged a glance – tempting the fates with a baited hook like that just cannot end well. Within five minutes, he went from “never been struck,” to “holy moly that one shook the plane,” by way of “well one that wasn’t so bad.” Three lightning strikes in five minutes remains my all-time record and I’ll happily remain out of the contest to push that bar any farther along.

In spite of my juniority – and a corresponding lack of hours in the right seat of the jet, it wasn’t my first lighting strike. Depending on your experience or that of your flight instructor, you might expect a tale to follow of how we proceeded to finish the flight with a partial electrical failure, an engine fire, a remagnetized compass, or any number of other doomsday scenarios. What actually happened was our eyes widened to the diameter of saucers, a few exchanges of gallows humor, and a concentrated effort to see if anything was affected by our foray into Mother Nature’s light show. From the cockpit, we couldn’t find a single bit of evidence that lightning had harmed a thing on our jet, but by the time we finished taking stock, the flight attendants had called up front to see what had just happened and if we were in an emergency. Once everyone had caught their breath, we began our descent for an uneventful landing at Patrick Henry Field.

On the exterior inspection after parking, it became evident that we had indeed suffered a trio of hits and had the marks to prove it. On the nose, a pair of small burns in the radome seemed to show where the energy had entered our airframe; the exit wounds were burn marks about the size of a nickel on the flaps, and a small chunk of composite material had departed the trailing edge of one winglet. Again, we’d noticed zero faults in the airplane after the events, and we were fairly certain the plane could safely return to Atlanta, but we were pilots, and it’s a mechanic’s job to sort that out. By the time the company rounded up a local mechanic to inspect the airplane, we had exceeded the duty limit for the day and were illegal for the return leg to Atlanta. With a planeload of passengers waiting at the gate, we had to inform them that there were no pilots legally available to fly them to Atlanta, and we’d try again in the morning.

In the meantime, the contracted mechanic had mapped out the damage – charting size and location of the burn marks, and representatives at Bombardier had consulted their engineering department. By the time we rolled out of bed to fly home the next morning, there were no passengers booked – we were to ferry an empty airplane back to Atlanta, where it would go straight into the maintenance hangar for our sheet metal wizards to install patches over the worst spots before it could return to passenger service.

The National Weather Service keeps tabs on these sorts of things, and they’ve published a figure that, on average, each airliner gets struck by lightning once or twice a year. As I preflight these birds with two decades or more in service, I believe it. Random patches often stick out in places that don’t make sense for normal damage, like being hit by a catering truck or baggage loaders.  In addition to that sort of damage, the energy of a lightning strike can magnetize parts of an aircraft creating all sorts of havoc with the avionics. Degaussing an airplane—removing the magnetic field—can be labor intensive. But the idea of a lightning strike outright destroying most airplanes is rather dramatic. Most airplanes, being metal, feature bonding straps across hinges and attachment points to establish electrical continuity so discharge can be routed out through static wicks or designed exit points in the airframe. Composite materials often feature a conductive layer to establish that same continuity. The Glasair IIILP homebuilt featured that design component to give peace of mind to builders and pilots who wanted all-weather versatility out of that cross-country machine.

A different kind of electrical phenomenon many pilots don’t experience until they’re in jets is Saint Elmo’s fire, where the static electricity generated moving through a cloud dances along parts of the airframe, most often the flight deck windscreens, in a dazzling display that looks about like a mad scientist’s Tesla coil. It can be a precursor to a lightning strike, and generally when I see Saint Elmo’s fire, I’m looking to change our course or altitude to find something better – the constant static encountered to sustain this display does often generate static in the radios that lasts a bit. If I’m getting that sort of static when flying, I’ll often ask the center controller for the next frequency as the static begins, in case we’re out of range when the noise subsides.

Saint Elmo’s fire, dancing along the windshield of a jet.

Another variation of how Saint Elmo’s fire can terminiate is ball lightning, a phenomenon that almost sounds like the stuff of ghost stories – a ball of energy forming initially outside the airframe, passing through the windshield and drifting slowly back through the cabin. In a November, 2021 piece in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics titled “An Initiation of Ball Lightning in an Aircraft,” Wilfried Heil and Don Smith detail a 1960s event when an orb of energy began as Saint Elmo’s fire, entered the flight deck, and followed the same path a person would take while walking down to the cargo deck. The abstract, introduction, and observation are an easy read; as you continue from there it gets into the nuts and bolts of how airplanes are designed to withstand these events while also de-mystifying an event that otherwise many people might discount as supernatural or imagined. I still haven’t experienced ball lightning, and if it stays that way, it’s absolutely fine by me.

For the remaining years we were at that regional airline, I addressed that check airman as “Sparky” whenever we crossed paths. We’ve both put a few airlines behind us now, but the experience remains fresh in my mind. With a jolting experience like we had, I’m pretty sure he remembers it too.