APNewsBreak: FAA to examine airport towers
Source: AP-EXCITE
By JESSICA GRESKO
WASHINGTON (AP) - A lightning strike that injured an air traffic controller at Baltimore's main airport has exposed a potential vulnerability at airport towers during storms and is prompting Federal Aviation Administration officials to inspect hundreds of towers nationwide, The Associated Press has learned.
The FAA will look for problems with the lightning protection systems for airport towers, where air traffic controllers do the vital job of choreographing the landings and takeoffs of tens of thousands of flights each day.
The FAA told The AP about the planned assessments of the towers' lightning protection systems after responding to a Freedom of Information Act request about the Sept. 12, 2013, lightning strike at the Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport.
The FAA said in a statement that the accident was "the first of its kind in FAA history," and the agency plans on "assessing the condition" of lightning protection systems at the 440 air traffic control towers it is responsible for across the country. In particular, the agency said it will examine lightning protection at more than 200 towers that were built prior to 1978, when the FAA first issued standards for the protection systems.
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Read more: http://apnews.excite.com/article/20140206/DABPNA082.html
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I tend to agree with Major Nikon. I have been intimately involved with lightning strikes for over 50 years. I was struck in the knees at Camp Thunder (I kid you not!) Boy Scout camp when I worked on staff there. I have taken lightning strikes in Lockheed JetStar II, Lockheed SP-2E, Boeing 737, and MD-80 aircraft. Since my retirement from the airline, I have worked five fire seasons in a 30-foot fire lookout tower on a 6400 foot butte in the Oregon high desert - a lightning magnet if ever there was one!
I had lightning safety engineers in the fire lookout tower in 2009. They explained to me how the lightning repulsion and lightning shedding protections of such towers work, and how they differ. They told me that the USFS has never lost a fire lookout in a tower to lightning, in over 100 years of staffing such towers. A few have been hurt, but it is a risk that goes without saying when you sign on for such a job.
I took a very near or direct strike in August of this past year. Like a strike I took in a Boeing 737-400 going into Tucson in the mid-90s, I knew it was coming. My hair started standing up in both instances.
About 95% of all lightning strikes carry a negative (-) charge. The other 5% are hotter, stronger positively charged "bolts." There is no doubt in my mind that there have been unexplained aircraft crashes from lightning strikes, and injuries in tower-like facilities too. Also, 95% of our western wildland fires are started by lightning.
As storms become more frequent, more numerous, and stronger in our changing climate, lightning will become more dangerous. Care and prudency are the watchwords, not hand-wringing and panic.
Now, I guess, is as good a time as any to announce my new fire lookout gig to DU. I will be leaving my beloved Deschutes National Forest for a lookout in the Coronado NF in southern Arizona. This lookout is the oldest staffed lookout in the US, it is in designated wilderness, and it sits on a rock outcropping at near 9000 feet. One of the reasons I chose this lookout (which is on the National Register of Historic Places) is to enhance my lightning photography portfolio (which is now weak). So, BRING IT ON!
Looking out over Ft. Rock (Oregon) in 2010. The peak just to the left of the lightning is Hager Mountain. The lookout on Hager got clobbered during this storm, and the woman staffing the lookout sustained minor injuries.