4 Turkish Airlines Planes Struck by Lightning

Four Turkish Airlines planes were forced to make emergency landings after they were struck by lightning on 4 March 2016. The planes were struck soon after they took off from Istanbul’s Ataturk International Airport. Luckily, all of the planes made safe emergency landings and no passengers were injured on any of the flights. One passenger said that the lightning struck their plane just 10 minutes after take-off.

The above video shows the lightning activity for the day these flights were interrupted. As you can see from the video (powered by Earth Networks Total Lightning Network) both in-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning was present during the storm. The planes could have been struck by either type of lightning.

Photo: aviation.stackexchange.com

We know that crew and passenger safety is of utmost importance to those in the commercial aircraft industry, which is why we’ve optimized our aviation solutions to reduce risk for various dangerous weather conditions like lightning, turbulence, and hail. To read more about the impacts of severe weather on aircrafts, check out more cases in our Weathering the Flight blog post.