Picture of a jet airliner being struck by lightning. [link] The lightning actually goes through the plane and continues down to the ground. Apparantly this happens a lot, and there's almost never any negative consequences to it.
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Metal aircraft can handle lightning strikes better than composite aircraft. NCAR uses a modified Schweizer SGS 2-32 sailplane for it's lightning research: [link] I saw it up close once when it was getting an annual inspection back in the late 1980s. The inspector told me that the lightning strikes usually just melt "small holes" in the skin. They had several repair options, depending on number, size, and position: ignore it, tape it over, do a small surface patch, or replace the whole panel. They really hated to have to replace a panel.
Electricity runs along the surface of the object it contacts unless the entire thing is made of a conductive material like copper, right?
Don't count on it.
From [link]
"The AAIB report makes the point that the sailplane was constructed almost entirely of glass reinforced plastic (GRP) with foam or honeycomb sections bonded together—materials that are electrically non-conductive. The report goes on to note that the most significant factor in this accident was the formation of lightning arcs within the enclosed volumes of the wings and fuselage. These, in turn, caused damaging shock waves and high overpressures that induced the structural disintegration."
More detail in HTML [link] or PDF [link]
Gotta love the understated British humor:
...the glider was struck by lightning and large sections of its airframe disintegrated.
From that moment, the instructor later stated that his memory was not particularly clear. He remembered hearing a 'very loud bang' and then 'feeling very draughty'; he also believed that he may have momentarily lost consciousness. On recovering, he felt dazed and remembered slowly becoming aware that 'something was seriously amiss' and that this was 'a real emergency requiring unpleasant and decisive action'. He was able to shout to his student in the front cockpit two or three times to undo his straps and abandon the glider but, owing to some impairment of his hearing, the student was unable to hear him clearly. The student had already decided to abandon the glider and, after he had departed, the instructor followed but was surprised when he realised that he had not had to jettison his cockpit canopy. It was estimated that both parachutes had successfully inflated by 1,800 feet agl.
...Apart from the damage to the hearing of both occupants, 'sooting' to the upper part of the instructor's jacket, parachute pack and the hair on the back of his head, neither suffered any major injuries as a result of the lightning strike. The student pilot landed on the roof of a disused petrol station adjacent to a busy road in the village of Northall, but escaped major injury. The instructor descended into a nearby field and suffered a broken ankle upon landing. The rescue services were quickly on the scene and both occupants were taken to hospital; the student pilot was allowed to return home later that evening and the instructor was released four days later after surgery to his ankle.
And an earlier incident with a composite sailplane cited in the AAIB report itself:
"The most recent known severe lightning strike to a glider in the UK occurred to a LS-4 glider on 31 July 1988. Despite receiving a shock from the control column, the pilot managed to land the glider. There was severe (continued...)
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