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St. Elmo's Fire
Wed Feb 16, 2005
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton, and today on The Weather Notebook, Robin White talks to pilot Rich
Caviness about flying with St. Elmo's Fire.
With all the information that airlines can get about weather conditions, it's usually easy for
pilots to avoid weather trouble. But Rich Caviness, who flies for Federal Express, says that
isn't always the case. There are some parts of the world that make it difficult.
RC: One that was pretty dicey was called the Straits of Malucca in Southeast Asia. We didn't
have clearance to be over either land mass, and the straits narrow to just a couple of miles
at its narrowest. So we're trying to look at the land mass, not fly over it, look back at the
weather, not fly into it -- back and forth and I got out of synch, and as I was looking at the
ground I ran into the top of a thunderstorm.
Uh oh. Caviness says he was already flying pretty high but he took the plane up to 43,000 feet
and put the crew on oxygen. That's when the plane was struck by St. Elmo's Fire, a ghostly
blue electrical discharge to the lightning strips at the front of the plane.
RC: It looked like we were like a caricature of a bumblebee with a big stinger going off in
the void and who knows how far I think it was, 35 feet, with this big, like electrode, just
arcing around like some old Frankenstein movie. You know, nar nar nar, just all around. We're
looking at each other saying, "can you believe this?"
And perhaps it was a good sign. St Elmo's Fire, which can happen on pointed buildings, trees,
and even cattle horns, is usually associated with the end of a thunderstorm. Sailors first
noticed the phenomena at sea, and believed they were being protected by their patron saint,
Elmo or Erasmus.
Robin White reports from San Francisco. The Weather Notebook, a production of the Mount
Washington Observatory, is generously funded by Subaru of America, and the National Science
Foundation.
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