Skip to main content

Scientists propose a counterintuitive way to avoid in-flight lightning strikes

It’s a discomforting thought but commercial aircraft are each struck by lightning at least once per year, according to estimates by aviation experts. Luckily, they rarely compromise flights. As passengers, we may not always notice the event, with our heads buried in airline pillows or eyes glued to a seatmate’s screen but it’s safe to say some inflight chaos would ensue if we were aware.

“[Lightning strikes] are more frequent than we would like,” Carmen Guerra-Garcia, an assistant professor of aeronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told Digital Trends. “Aircraft manufacturers take great care to make the aircraft safe under such an event but embedding all the necessary protection is costly. Also, if struck, the repairs are costly… and, from the airline perspective, more costs are associated with having the aircraft out of service for inspections and repair.”

With their electrically conductive surfaces, planes serve as something like lightning rods in flight. Their amplified electrical fields make aircraft themselves responsible for about 90 percent of these strikes. Planes are usually rerouted to avoid storms and potential lightning, but a new idea investigated by Guerra-Garcia and her colleagues would actually see planes intentionally increase their electrical charge and fly right through the threatening storms.

Although it sounds counterintuitive — or even a bit insane — the researchers demonstrate in a report recently published in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Journal that there is a sweet spot for an airplane’s electrical charge that that could let it avoid strikes, even in the midst of a storm.

Guerra-Garcia explained, “The idea is to have electric field sensors on the aircraft that continuously monitor the electrical environment the vehicle is subjected to. From these measurements, onboard algorithms would determine the risk of a strike and the net charge level of the aircraft required to improve the situation. The onboard controller would then command the actuators (ion emitters that can charge the aircraft) to drive the aircraft to the optimum net charge level, that which keeps equal safety margins for the positive and negative ‘leader.’”

Leaders refer to electrical causeways that branch out from a plane’s highly conductive exterior. When these causeways reach an oppositely charged region, they form a circuit, and can result in a tremendous bolt of energy hitting the plane. Through mathematical models, Guerra-Garcia and her team showed that changing a plane’s electrical potential, by charging it negatively, significantly reduced the risk of a strike.

Having presented a theoretical study, Guerra-Garcia said the next step is laboratory validation. However, she warned that this method is still some ways away from real-world applications, as it would entail advances in modeling capability that are currently not possible with onboard predictive algorithms.

Editors' Recommendations

Dyllan Furness
Dyllan Furness is a freelance writer from Florida. He covers strange science and emerging tech for Digital Trends, focusing…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more