hi can someone explain to me why would electricity, that normally chooses the shorter/easier path, hit an airplane connected to the ground through rubber??? i guess there was nothing better to hit?
Why does the lightning "pick" a path through a large rubber tire(an insulator) over continuing through the same medium that brought it to the vertical stabilizer in the first place, right? Especially when a large rubber insulator exists between the aircraft and ground. An excellent question. After the lightning "hits" the plane it travels through the conductive surface skin of the aircraft, when it reached the nose gear it likely had a "choice" of going through the tire or arcing through the air. Because the rubber has more resistance than the moist air surrounding it, it most likely continued to ground via the air. I can't go into this any further without getting into physics, but let me know if this explanation helped at all.
Good answer. I would imagine that the discharge came either through the axle or the bonding strap located adjacent to the gear. If you look at the video towards the end, it appears as if the bonding strap was blown from the grounding stud on the ramp.
A not-so-little piece of something came flying from the front wheel area...wonder what that was? Flies towards the left side of the frame immediately after the strike. Scary stuff.
