14 DAY TRIAL // Though a relatively large number of investigations have revealed that being aboard an airplane while the aircraft flies through the middle of a large thunderstorm is perfectly safe, a new work begs to differ. A number of experts feel that, while flying through large atmospheric fronts, lightning strikes can easily produce X-rays, gamma rays and high-energy electrons, which then hit the people inside the planes. The new work was conducted by experts at the Florida Institute of Technology, the University of California in Santa Cruz (UCSC), and the University of Florida.
The group, however, admits that the instances in which this happens are actually fairly rare, and that more research into the matter is needed before a clear conclusion can be drawn. But, it argues, the preliminary results of its analysis show that the increased levels of radiation can be harmful to passengers. Coupled with exposure to other sources, such as electronic devices and medical scans, the instances in which traveling people experience this type of poisoning may be contributing to an increase in the large number of Americans who appear to have been exposed to much more radiation than the safety limit entails.
“We know that commercial airplanes are typically struck by lightning once or twice a year. What we don't know is how often planes happen to be in just the right place or right time to receive a high radiation dose. We believe it is very rare, but more research is needed to answer the question definitively,” Florida Tech Professor of Physics and Space Sciences Joe Dwyer says. He adds that, if the airplane is near the point of origin for a lightning strike, or for a terrestrial gamma-ray flash, then passengers inside could be exposed to up to 400 times the radiation dose a patient receives after being exposed to a chest X-ray.
In order to get to the new conclusions, the experts “combined observations of lightning-produced X-rays and gamma rays with computer models of the movement of high-energy particles to estimate the amount of radiation that could be produced within, or very near, thunderclouds during lightning storms,” Florida Tech senior researcher Hamid Rassoul, also a coauthor of the new paper, explains.
“If an aircraft happened to be in or near the high-field region when either a lightning discharge or a TGF event is occurring, then the radiation dose received by passengers and crew members inside the aircraft could potentially approach 10 rem in less than one millisecond,” the authors write. The research is to be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal for Geophysical Research – Atmosphere.