Footage of a fat lightning bolt drilling an Icelandic commercial plane as it was departing from Keflavík International Airport is starting to make the rounds on the world wide web today.
The low-flying plane escaped unharmed, as commercial aircrafts are equipped with lightning protection engineered into the aircraft, but the footage is still a bit unnerving.
These incidents aren’t all that uncommon, as Scientific American estimates that on average, each airplane in the U.S. commercial fleet is struck lightly by lightning more than once each year. The last confirmed commercial plane crash in the U.S. directly attributed to lightning occurred in 1967, when lightning caused a catastrophic fuel tank explosion.
Regardless, I’ll take the bus.
[h/t FTW]