
Close Encounter with a Gigantic Jet - nabilhat
https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2019/10/25/close-encounter-with-a-gigantic-jet/
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new_here
Two weeks ago I was on a flight into London. While we were coming down through
some clouds I was looking out of the window for a clearing when I saw an
almost blinding purple flash which was followed by a loud crack. I looked
forward with pure panic in my eyes at the airhost who was smiling, he calmly
informed me that we had just been struck by lighting. Apparently, it's not
uncommon and planes are designed to withstand it. I learnt something new that
day.

~~~
darrenf
My gf and I flew between two tiny airports in Costa Rica a couple of years
back, a Sansa operated 13 seat Cessna. As we went inland and over forests and
volcano we became enveloped by dark clouds, battered by rain. No lightning,
but we were jolted up, down, left and right repeatedly. Meanwhile the two crew
thought nothing of it, in fact one of them appeared to just be merrily using
Snapchat throughout. I took this as a sign that we were in no real danger – if
they were having to work hard to control the plane I'd be much more worried!
My gf, who was absolutely terrified of the whole thing, didn't quite agree
with me...

Later that day, our new accommodation had a printed FAQ in the room including
"which of Sansa or NatureAir is the safest for flying domestically?". The
answer was "Sansa have the braver pilots".

~~~
ryanmercer
>My gf and I flew between two tiny airports in Costa Rica a couple of years
back, a Sansa operated 13 seat Cessna. As we went inland and over forests and
volcano we became enveloped by dark clouds, battered by rain. No lightning,
but we were jolted up, down, left and right repeatedly. Meanwhile the two crew
thought nothing of it, in fact one of them appeared to just be merrily using
Snapchat throughout.

Flying back to IND from SFO mid last year we were in some really rough weather
(hands down the worst turbulence I've ever experienced) for 20-25 minutes. It
was bad enough reading was a futile attempt so I stowed my kindle in my bag
and tried to get a nap, I'm sitting there 3/4 asleep with my chin on my chest
and the lady across the aisle asks the lady next to me "oh my god, is he
asleep or praying" at which point I looked up and said "I was trying to read
but we're bouncing around too much so I thought I'd get a nap".

At that elevation, if the cabin was compromised we'd have all been unconscious
in seconds and if we were just damaged enough to crash, I figured I'd worry
about being scared as we started to fall out of the sky as worst case we'd
have 1-2 minutes before we hit the ground.

The only time I get scared in a plane is take off, once the plane is doing
about 3/4 of the speed it needs to, until maybe 5 seconds after the wheels
leave the ground I'm absolutely terrified. I don't mind the steep climb, I
don't mind the landing, but taking off scares me like nothing else climaxing
when you feel the wheels leave the tarmac, my blood goes cold (and I'll even
breakout in a cold sweat sometimes) every single time.

That fear has always been there too. The first time I ever flew was in a small
4-seat with my 5th grade teacher. He took all of us in his class up that
Saturday that were in scouts and any of our dads that wanted to go. I was
absolutely terrified once he started accelerating and losing it, within
seconds of wheels off the ground I was like "Look over there! Look at that,
wow look at the ground, oh man everything is getting so small, wow! Can you
tilt the plane so we can see better?"

I must have been a rocket-sled dummy in a past life or something.

~~~
dmos62
Me and my gf were taking a cable car up this mountain from a Swiss ski resort
during off-season to go hiking. The weather was pretty bad too, it was the end
of the day, so we were the only people taking the cable cars. We rushed over
there, because it was something like 16:25 and it was closing at 16:30. The
whole ride is about 15 minutes. You might see where this is going. Exactly at
16:30, we're about 3/4 way up by then, all the cable cars stop, and start
swinging. They don't normally swing while they're being pulled, if they stop
mid-way, then they start to swing. Apparently, this isn't such a rare
occurance, but we're not skiiers and this was very unsettling. You just see a
long fall onto steep rocks below you and hear the wind howling, all the while
the thing (that is hardly bigger than a changing booth) is swinging like a
gigantic swinging set. It then started moving again after about 60 seconds,
only to stop again after maybe 30 seconds, and then it started and stopped 2-3
more times. It was nerve wracking. I look back to it with a smile, but when
the cable car finally arrived at the top we practically flew out of it.

~~~
_nalply
Perhaps stopping to prevent the car banging sideways at the walls when
entering at the top. This could be an automatic safety feature. You wrote that
the weather was bad, was it windy?

~~~
dmos62
It was, but not especially so. I hadn't considered that, that would make
sense.

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deepGem
This is one of those images that elicits 'wow' even on a small screen. Can't
imagine how it must have felt to experience this in person. I clicked on the
video and it downloaded straight. Such a rarity these days. Not sure about the
copyrights but am keeping this video for a really long time :).

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hos234
I hope someday we learn to make controllable mini-storms. All kinds of
interesting things to study thanks to the energy levels.

From wikipedia - "Scientists estimate that a tropical cyclone releases heat
energy at the rate of 50 to 200 exajoules (10^18 J) per day, equivalent to
about 1 PW (10^15 watt). This rate of energy release is equivalent to 70 times
the world energy consumption of humans and 200 times the worldwide electrical
generating capacity, or to exploding a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20
minutes"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_cyclone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_cyclone)

~~~
Joakal
Energy has to come from somewhere. It's not like a nuclear reactor where it
starts in place. With hurricanes, we're talking about the energy in area of
the entire ocean being concentrated.

Better off creating hurricane-proof windmills.

~~~
pjc50
Yup. That's really the only way to take energy out of the ocean. If we could
somehow fill the surface of the Atlantic with turbines and wave-energy
machines, perhaps we could end destructive tropical storms. But the amount of
energy involved is astonishing and difficult to reason about.

~~~
novok
Maybe you could use it to power ocean cleanup drones, which could use
harvested material to manufacture more cleanup drone hulls.

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gelo
Every time I look at fork lightning of any kind, it keeps reminding me of
natures version of a depth first search algorithm. If you ever watch a high
speed capture of a fork lightning youll see it spray out and as soon as it
gets a link to ground, the energy backtracks up that path.

~~~
dredmorbius
I picture neurons creating new connective paths as similar to this.

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kuu
Funny because yesterday I read about these jets captured by a high speed
camera for the first time in Nature magazine:

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12261-y](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12261-y)

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neotek
The one time in my life I actually want a news article to embed a video, and
they make it a download-only .mov link.

~~~
pavel_lishin
The video is not as good as the isolated frames.

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athenot
This seems like a major obstacle in the way of space elevators. I would
imagine running what amounts to a short-circuit wire from the ionosphere to
the ground might be a bit tricky…

~~~
dredmorbius
I've speculated on this before. @carapace was kind enough to provide a
reference showing that exactly this happened on an experiment utilising a 20km
space tether deployed from the Space Shuttle. The line literally fried itself
due to charge build-up and induced currents.

[https://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/Education/wtether.html](https://www-
istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/Education/wtether.html)

Discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20898725](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20898725)

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drfrank
Is this the phenomena described in Neal Stephenson's _Atmosphaera Incognita_?

