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Airliners can be seriously damaged by lightning bolts that strike out of seemingly storm-free skies - yet all that most pilots have to warn them of lightning risk are weather radars that track precipitation, but not lightning. It's a situation that the United States' air safety watchdog wants to change: it says air traffic controllers could be given the technology to sense and plot the radio signals characteristic of lightning activity - and warn pilots where the danger lies.
In a safety recommendation published today, the US National Transportation Safety Board in Washington, DC reveals a litany of cases in which airliners suffered lightning or turbulence damage as they unknowingly flew into weather systems with little detectable precipitation.
For instance, on 14 August 2011, a US Airways Boeing 757 jet flying from Philadelphia to the Caribbean was struck by lightning at 16,000 feet, creating smoke in the cockpit - which could have meant a lethal wiring fire - that forced an emergency landing in Baltimore. Using weather radar alone, Washington air traffic control had warned the crew of only moderate rain - but they hit severe turbulence and lightning. A meteorological lightning map (see picture below) showed that the aircraft had navigated straight into a heavy lightning field.
In January this year, a lightning strike hit an American Airlines Embraer 145 jet at 17,500 feet over Farmersville, Texas, again leading to an emergency landing. Back in 2002, a Chautauqua Airlines Embraer 145 flying over Connecticut had two of its four elevator control cables severed by a lightning strike. It landed safely. In both cases there had been no "extreme precipitation returns" on weather radar, the NTSB says.
Because of these and many similarly harrowing cases in the report, the NTSB is asking the US Federal Aviation Administration to assess the viability of adding lightning data to air traffic controller displays and, if possible, on cockpit displays too. This would seem a reasonable idea: even cellphones can detect lightning when enough of their radio receivers (WiFi, 3G, Bluetooth, RFID) are used to assess the signature of incoming radio waves.
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