Why are airplanes able to get hit by lighting without it affecting the electronics, passengers, or ability to fly?
In: Physics
The lightning rides around the outside of the plane the same way a rain drop does.
The bolt is looking to find the earth as quickly as possible; going through the inside of the plane is harder than riding the skin.
Actually airplanes can be, and are affected by lightning strikes. The result is just usually not that bad, but it’s still mandated that post-strike the plane has to be inspected. The plane is not, contrary to what others here are saying, a Faraday cage. The most likely regions to be struck are leading wing tips or the nose, and the most likely place for the current to exit is the tail. The reason that the lightning doesn’t tend to fry the people *inside* the plane has to do with an analogue to the Skin Effect. The current will tend to remain on the surface of a conductor, although this usually only applies to AC, for various non-ELI5 reasons it also applies to a lightning strike.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-happens-when-lightni/
The aluminum body of the airplane acts as a faraday cage, by redirecting lightning around, instead of through the airplane. There is a bit of capacitance inside the plane, so somethings can be affected by the lightning, though almost never causing fatal damage. The lightning is mostly passing through the body of the plane towards the ground, which has the highest capacitance.
The parts of the planes that are most sensitive to lightning are the computers. All of which have surge suppressors to block electrical surges from damaging them.
It’s because when an airplane is in the air it is considered part of the circuit, the electricity will just travel through the metal hull and then down to the ground where the circuit is complete. The electronics in air planes are insulated from the hull and in the case of things like their radar and radio equipment in the nose of the airplane they have highly conductive material that diverts the electricity around the equipment rather than through it.
Most of the reason is that the hull of the aircraft (the fuselage) forms a **Faraday cage**, protecting the delicate contents of the plane (i.e. the people and electronics) by harmlessly directing the flow of electricity around the outside of the aircraft.
A lightning strike has an entry and an exit point on an airplane. They’re typically designed with special materials to help control those points. Think of it like a lightning rod.
We had a gear box for a propeller system become magnetized because the lightning entered the tail and exited through the propeller. This made the reduction gear box unusable at the cost of nearly 125k to replace.
So airplanes are affected.
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