A Virgin Atlantic engineer reveals that passenger planes are struck by lightening more than you may realise

LIGHTNING strikes may not be something most plane passengers expect to experience when travelling, yet it turns out they happen far more frequently than you might expect – and your flight could have been hit without you ever knowing. A Virgin Atlantic engineer reveals all. Though aircraft crew brief passengers on safety protocols at the …

LIGHTNING strikes may not be something most plane passengers expect to experience when travelling, yet it turns out they happen far more frequently than you might expect – and your flight could have been hit without you ever knowing. A Virgin Atlantic engineer reveals all.

Though aircraft crew brief passengers on safety protocols at the beginning of a flight, they rarely involve lightning strikes. Most travellers likely don’t even think about being struck by lightning when jetting off on holiday.

However, a Virgin Atlantic engineer has revealed that these natural occurrences hit passenger planes “more often than you might think”.

According to the Federal Aviation Administration, an aeroplane is hit once every 1,000 flight hours, yet Stuart Moreton, an aircraft maintenance manager for Virgin Atlantic has suggested it could be more than this – though passengers probably wouldn’t even notice if it happened.

“Aircraft being struck by lightning happens much more often than you are likely to think,” he revealed as part of Virgin Atlantic’s Instagram Live Flight School.

“However this does no damage to the aircraft during its flight or to any of its systems, and most passengers won’t even know that their aircraft has been struck at all.”

In fact, it would seem that aircraft are designed to be hit by lightning and to survive when it does happen.

Professor Mamu Haddad professor and director at Cardiff University’s Morgan-Botti Lightning Laboratory told The Telegraph in 2019 that this is thanks to the way in which aircraft are made.

Most modern aircraft are made from lightweight carbon composite covered with a thin layer of copper, which protects everything inside of the metal from electrical currents.

This can protect them up to 30,000 amperes – the unit used to measure electrical currents.

Of course, there have been some more serious accidents where lightning was involved.

One of the most well known was in 1963 when a lightning strike over Maryland caused the wing on a Pan Am aircraft to explore while in flight.

The incident resulted in 81 fatalities.

However, the accident caused the aviation industry to rethink the way in which aircraft were developed, and modern planes are far more equipped to cope with such impacts.

“When lightning does strike an aeroplane it normally enters through the nose of the aeroplane, leaving a small burn mark somewhere on the fuselage, travels through the aircraft, exiting either near the rear of the fuselage or on a wingtip, and it’s these burn marks that we have to often go to the advice of the structural engineer for,” continues Mr Moreton.

“Most of the time it is just a matter of drilling out the burn mark with a drill and then filling the hole with a solid rivet.

“You may also have noticed there are small black sticks called static wicks that are fixed along the trailing edge of the wing.

“These are there to help dissipate things like lightning and static electricity build up during an aircraft flight, and they are designed to actually be blown off in case of lightning strikes.”

In some cases, passengers and crew may hear some noise, or a flash of light, when lightning impacts a plane, however, it is unlikely to bring the aircraft down.

ABC News states that the chance of witnessing a lightning strike while above the clouds is just one in 1250 for passengers who fly.

Although this figure is more likely than on the ground, it is still not very frequent.

Follow us on Google News