Airplanes and lightning strikes
It's still not clear what happened to the Air France Airbus 330 which disappeared en route from Rio to Paris, but the airline has suggested that it may have been struck by lightning.
In fact, it is not uncommon for planes to be hit by lightning. In 2006 the BBC made a freedom of information request to the Civil Aviation Authority for details of incidents from the previous five years where aircraft had been hit by lightning.
The CAA told us that in 2001 to 2006 there were 162 cases reported where a lightning strike had resulted in damage to an aircraft or malfunction of an essential service, for example navigation systems. This data only covers planes in the service of UK operators. (We don't have the information since 2006).
The CAA reports included two instances of an Airbus 330 being struck. In one case [105KB PDF] in 2005, it led to a temporary loss of flight indications such as airspeed and altimeters. In the other case [105KB PDF] in 2003, systems were mainly unaffected but on landing several holes were discovered along the side of the plane.
According to this material sent to the BBC under FOI in 2006 by the CAA, EMB-145 aircraft (generally used on short-haul domestic flights) cropped up particularly often in the reports of lightning strikes.
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Am I right in assuming that none of these 162 lightning strikes damaging aircraft resulted in emergencies, and certainly not in crashes ? That would certainly be reassuring for nervous passengers !
Air crashes involving major carriers are now very rare, so the latest Air France disaster comes as a shock. But apparently there are something like 50,000 commercial flights a day, so flying is by far the safest form of transport. And it is getting safer, too.
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Tom -
Your assumption is correct. Perhaps I should have made clearer that all the 162 flights involved continued safely without crashing.
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Airplane - has the BBC been taken over by the Americans? Aeroplane.
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