Thursday night's electrifying Valley storm produced 7,000 lightning events ranging from in-cloud to cloud-to-ground, according to Chris Vagasky, the Lightning Applications Manager for Vaisala.
"Lightning is thousands of times more powerful than electricity that runs through your walls. It gets hotter than the surface of the Sun," Vagasky says.
Many businesses and homes are protected from the natural phenomena by using lightning rods. Rods are meant to intercept lightning strikes that then go through conductive wires and eventually to a grounding plate on the soil away from a building.
That same operation can't be done on airplanes, however.
DNB Engineering in Chandler specializes in testing electronics that go inside an aircraft, ranging from radios to television screens on headrests, making sure everything works if lightning strikes a plane on the ground or in the air.
"It's a whole big world that involves all sorts of different things," says DNB Engineering Associate Vice President Jacob Broaddus. "Including everything from physical to electronic disruptions that could possibly send the incorrect signal to something and tell it to do something it doesn't understand."
