2 Parked on ramp, 1gets wing blown off...

Yikes! Where was this?
 
MAYBE your plane is OK. Just because there is no obvious damage doesn't mean that there isn't something that screwed up. Electricity jumps and it could be a very small entry point. Certainly check everything out before flying the next time.
 
Why did the wing blow off? I thought lightning strikes on aircraft were relatively innocuous events?
 
Tantalum said:
Why did the wing blow off? I thought lightning strikes on aircraft were relatively innocuous events?
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In the air, perhaps... Grounded... Not so much.

If you're a bird, you can stand on a high voltage line... But sidle up against the pole... Poof!

The above are generalizations... Not specific.
 
Tantalum said:
Why did the wing blow off? I thought lightning strikes on aircraft were relatively innocuous events?
Click to expand...

There’s probably a hole in the asphalt under a wheel and a weld spot or worse in the wheel or bearing assembly.
 
I have :)always like the Cardinal, very sleek looking airplane.
 
CharlieD3 said:
In the air, perhaps... Grounded... Not so much.

If you're a bird, you can stand on a high voltage line... But sidle up against the pole... Poof!

The above are generalizations... Not specific.
Click to expand...
Thanks, but does the bird analogy work? When lightning strikes a plane in the air, is the current not going through it on the way to the ground? I would imagine a bird getting struck by lightning dies, as the current travels through it, and down to the ground. When they're sitting on the wire the bird is not being used as a "quickest path to the ground" as it would during a lightning strike

I thought planes were safe on this though, I've been told the current travels around the outside of the plane, and outside of some scorching where it entered / exited it's not a life threatening event. There was a Cirrus some years ago that was struck by lightning and I don't believe it's all that uncommon for planes to get hit. If the wing is being blown off I wonder if there was some other event that the lightning catalyzed (some fuel vapor exploding, existing corrosion somewhere that arc'd weird?)

In the photo below you can see the scorch marks, it was like this through all the FIKI TKS surfaces.. clearly, despite the wire mesh embedded into the fuselage, the current found it's path of least resistance through the metal FIKI TKS panels

It is reassuring though that the composite structure did not blow up, as some have opined it may
upload_2020-1-12_20-55-8.png
 
Tantalum said:
I thought planes were safe on this though, I've been told the current travels around the outside of the plane, and outside of some scorching where it entered / exited it's not a life threatening event.
Click to expand...

Difficult topic. NOAA and NCAR ran a super crazy program many years ago where they convinced a test pilot to fly a Schweitzer sailplane, all aluminum construction, near thunderstorms to test various things like lightning strikes.

The aircraft, with multiple spot weld looking things in various places, sat in their hangar at KBJC as a display for years.

Noooooo thanks.

They published a few papers on it.
 
Tantalum said:
...lightning strikes on aircraft were relatively innocuous...
Click to expand...
In the air, general aviation pilots are steering clear of thunderheads. So, their airplanes are vulnerable to cloud-to-cloud lightning. It's a couple of thousand amps, and skin effect acts to conduct the bulk of the damaging currents around the surface of the plane (assuming aluminum here). You can still get a fraction of the current into the interior of the plane, with various bad outcomes. Relatively innocuous.

An aircraft on the ground is a different story. Yes, the skin effect still works. But in this scenario, the plane is subject to a cloud-to-ground strike. Figure 10,000-50,000 amps, over a few microseconds. Lots more energy. Another factor: the last few jogs in the path of a cloud-to-ground strike induce risers from the ground, resulting in a meet in the middle situation. Truly spectacular.

Just bad luck for the unfortunate aircraft. Yes, the wheel bearings are welded. Maybe, the skin effect has spared the plane's avionics.

The issue of grounding, or insulating, the parked aircraft, doesn't matter. A protective cage has to surround the plane to be effective.
 
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