Lightning and airports
 

I have just spent a day waiting with a team to examine a building in central Germany, and been thwarted by Lightening as we are not allowed to ascend if lightning is within 30 miles. Well we have detectors, and they have been going off all day so nothing done productively, but it got me thinking on others who work outside like airports, and wondered if they had same issues re distance. Given todays weather here, nothing would be flying due to lack of ground staff. I think someone once told me 5 miles in Miami Int, but that seems very close for lightening. Anyone got any ideas. Hopefully better weather tomorrow and my crew can get on, while I head for home.

Cheers
Mr Mac

I'd say 30 miles is being pretty careful - after all how many people get struck by lightening at all - in places like Bogor in Indonesia you'd never get anything done as it flashes and bangs just about every afternoon. And W Texas can be as bad .

I can see you might not want to be the single person standing on top of a metal tower on a flat plain but I'd have thought for most buildings in a city the chances are pretty low - or almost insignificant really.

What strikers me is that lightening would allow aircraft to ascend faster than otherwise, as well as incuring significant fuel savings.
Isn't shedding weight a major part of any airline's commercial strategy?

Most aircraft are full of holes thanks to lightening ...

I believe it's 5nm. It could be 5km but if I was in a fuel truck with an active TS rattling around, I wouldn't want to be connected to an aircraft if the cell was that close.
Update. Google AI suggests 5nm or 15 minutes.

I take it you were climbing the building on the outside: tall buildings get struck regularly and everyone inside them keeps on working. I've only once ever been in a building that was struck, it was a pub, and all the real ale went sour. The breakers all tripped, so the lights went out until the landlord reset them, but apart from that there was just a big bang and sour beer.

Yes I should have clarified it was an external inspection of a high rise building 40 floors. We normally use 10 miles for lightening but client insisted on 30miles yesterday. To be honest there were quite a lot of large storms all across Northern Germany yesterday in there defence and I have seen lightning bolts travel considerable distances ie over 20 miles in severe storms.

Cheers
Mr Mac

I've hung up my climbing gear and hard hat for good, with few regrets, I found climbing exhausting and dirty, and being swung up in a bo'suns chair tended to make me regret eating breakfast. The tallest structure I ever climbed was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belmon...itting_station (not the whole way to the top, just the tubular steel section) where the problem was not so much lightning as the RF energy from the TV transmitting antennas up top, 4 x 500 kW, which meant that as a spanner approached a bolt, an RF spark would leap between the two. To climb the lattice tower section the TV transmitters had to be switched off, as the RF energy was enough to cook you, like a microwave oven. Since the closure of analogue TV, you can now climb to the top of the lattice section safely. I'd be happy for someone else to do it.

Belmont is still marked on aeronautical charts as a radiation hazard, as the RF energy is sufficient to upset an aircraft's avionics. The power is now only 2 x 150 kW, but the charts haven't been changed.

Surely if anything is going to be struck on an airfield, it would be the control tower? Airfields tend to be flat.

You're not kidding!

https://cimg7.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....6c64cacf26.png

I didn't realise it was possible to pinpoint lightning that closely. Where did you get that map from?

Justapax1
I haven’t done transmission towers as they are not glazed as a rule but I have been up the Emley Moor mast but that has a lift. Yesterday’s was all by truck mounted Boom and roof cradle. All done today and I have seen footage and good for another few years yet.
As for lightening on airports I have seen lightening hit the tail of a jet on a ramp at Dulles and operations had already been suspended for the line squall.

Tredi
Yesterday was a little more than a line squall it went on for most of the day. It was a pity we were not working at night as it would have been even more dramatic. Germany and Eastern Holland do get some severe storms in summer including Tornadoes occasionally, some of which can be quite high on the Fujits scale.

Cheers
Mr Mac

Belmont and Emley Moor used to be twins. I went up Belmont in the lift in the mid 90s and it was slow and juddering, I asked if it was ok. 'Sure it is'. Next day it fell with two guys inside it, between them they broke over 50 bones and never returned to work. The owners at the time, I think they were Arqiva, were fined heavily after the enquiry found that the safety locks had been 'temporarily' disabled months before and never fixed.

The lift never returned to service, the mast was climbed externally.

Another of my nine lives gone...:rolleyes:

Justapax1
That was a close call.
Luckily I have managed to get through my construction career with only one close call and that was in the UK on Little Britain project on London Wall in late 1980,s. I was stood looking at some steel work turned around and there was a woosh and thud behind me. A Steelworker had dropped a Podger which as you may know has a spike on one and should be on a restraining lanyard but wasn’t.

It came down from level 9 and missed me by by about 250mm and embedded itself in the London loam up to the socket end 🙄
Being young and immortal I shrugged it off until later in the day when I became a little more angry and emotional 🙂

Cheers
Mr Mac

That map appears to be from a different site, but here's one example of lightning mapping:

https://map.blitzortung.org/#3.3/51.35/21.7

They are able to detect lightning strikes from the electromagnetic pulse, and with two or more detections of the same strike, to triangulate the strike locations.

I only climbed towers to put microwave dishes on them, more accurately to point them in the right direction once someone else had put them up there. I've never been a natural climber, I always prefer to have at least three limbs attached to something, plus a safety harness locked to something which I have previously confirmed isn't corroded. I don't jump around like a monkey on the top of dishes connected only by one hand and a carabiner, as some of my colleagues did. And some of them fell. :eek: Throughout the 70s to 90s there was an average one one fatality a year in the UK in the rigging industry, many falling off roofs where there wasn't a griplock. Broken bones were just shrugged off as an occupational risk.

Another occasion was going up a perfectly safe tower in Helsinki, stepping out onto a steel-mesh gantry, only for my host to say 'don't step there, the steel sections have been swollen by ice and are no longer safe'. Looking at my feet, what I was standing on were steel sections swollen and split with ice, This is an example of the Finnish sense of humour.

I prefer safer pastimes in my old age, like hang-gliders and 700cc motorbikes.

I don't know what a podger is.

From this site - usually have it on if storms forecast...

https://www.lightningmaps.org/

The rules vary depending on the airfield operator. Several decades ago the RAF in Germany would not allow any refuelling of aircraft if the Met Office declared a certain level of lightning risk, but I can't recall how that was worded or defined. At the other end of the scale, KMCO (Orlando International) seemed to pay no attention, and all work continued. However, in about the 90s, they did have a couple of ramp workers struck and killed by lightning. Just personal recollections from a distance in time, and I am open to correction.

In Antarctica, there is no earth ('ground' to USizens) because the stations, except those on the coast, are on ice. There is static electricity, and sparks jumping between aircraft and re-fuelling vessels (whether drums or snowmobiles) at different potentials are a concern, you connect a metal strap between the re-fueller and the aircraft before even a sniff of fuel gets transferred.. Surely at Orlando International secondary sparking during re-fuelling would have been a concern? Or is it not a lightning hazard aeroport? I've only been to Florida once, and in the summer it seemed to me to have some pretty rough weather.

Most of my experience of weather related incidents concerning towers and what are on them are from Ireland, which has a very low incidence of lightning. It does get a bit breezy at times though, and wind + rain = radial icing. But I'm drifting off topic.

When I worked in the Snowy Mountains region there were some basalt cliffs that always used to cop a lot of hits during electrical storms, which we attributed to the rock and their elevation. Quite spectacular, as the strikes were visible from our office about 10-15 km away. Our river gauging station about 5 or 6 km away and much lower always suffered more lightning damage than any others until we installed extra protection. No one was keen to work there during electrical storms, although we had done so without any injuries until the effect was noticed when we installed electronic instruments.
Apparently, many deaths from lightning are not from direct strikes, but from a nearby strike which causes a potential difference between the victim's feet as it radiates through the ground from the strike zone.

Wikipedia tells us:
We can readily understand that, upon having such an item miss you by 250mm, it would tighten more than just your nuts ...

https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....5732219d16.jpg