First Successful Lightning Triggering and Guiding Using a Drone
33 comments
·April 23, 2025rkagerer
This is really cool, but I'm super skeptical of their proposed use case for protecting cities.
Aren't lightning conditions often preceded by strong winds and poor weather conditions? Not a great time to be flying drones. And the approach seems more complicated than simply installing lightning rods.
I'd sooner envision people using the technique to get a kick out of throwing lightning around like they're Zeus.
prawn
I've flown my Mavics in rain and strong wind before - certainly stronger than anything I'd associate with lightning. Most of the lightning storms I've seen haven't been especially windy, but it might vary elsewhere. And that's a consumer drone with negligible weatherproofing.
I assume if there's a business case, they'll eventually automate this with drone swarms that wait in cabinets on building rooftops.
binary132
FWIW, where I live there are often intense thunderstorms during the spring and summer, and they are usually accompanied by windstorms, sometimes generating tornadoes.
bestouff
AFAIK the electric buildup starts even before the meteorological shenanigans.
mrbluecoat
> flying drones into optimal positions beneath thunderclouds to actively trigger lightning strikes, and then guiding the discharge safely away from vulnerable areas
From a military standpoint, I wonder what it would take to discharge into a vulnerable area...
foxglacier
You could put the wire in the vulnerable area - perhaps using the same drone? But I don't think it would be any use. A lightning strike releases about 1 GJ of energy, mostly into the sky. So the effect at the target would probably be no more than a few kg of explosives which you could have delivered using the wire anyway.
pixl97
Plausible deniability?
People tend to get mad when you bomb them, but if no one noticed the drone in the storm it's just a natural strike...
stronglikedan
> I wonder what it would take to discharge into a vulnerable area
HAARP /s
nayuki
We've come a long way from Benjamin Franklin flying a kite into lightning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kite_experiment
_benj
That is impressive, specially the drone surviving! I expect something along the lines of disposable drones, which would like still be cost effective at saving 100-200b yen a year! It’ll be fascinating seeing this deployed!
dole
This [1] article claims that the electricity from 115 strikes could power the entire US grid for a year, but it's surely napkin math. Awesome tech, though!
[1] https://www.treehugger.com/how-much-energy-is-in-lightning-8...
janalsncm
Apparently a single lightning strike contains the equivalent of about 40 gallons of gasoline. It’s very powerful but not that significant on the scale of a whole city.
In fact a quick back of the napkin math suggests it would only power a city of a million people for half a second.
hinkley
I wonder what the average property damage is per strike. And if forcing lightning reduces or changes storm power. Maybe for preventative reasons you put them outside of towns and such.
xnx
That article seems very very wrong. I think they missed the difference between GW and GWh.
colechristensen
that article does not make that claim
aaron695
[dead]
FlyingSnake
I wonder if we managed to harness and store this electricity from the lightning into some kind of large battery. If a drone can successfully fly and connect with the lighting, this seems like a possibility.
Edit: I read past the line where they mentioned this was in the plans.
anonymousiam
The lightning "strike" mentioned in the article was probably not a direct hit. Nothing can really survive >30kA of current. I recall concerns from Boeing engineers when they switched to carbon fiber fuselages, that a strike would be far more serious than before, with Aluminum fuselages.
https://www.weather.gov/safety/lightning-power
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/35493/are-carbo...
cantrecallmypwd
There's 2 kinds of CG and there's long-line-induced EM.
Ordinary -CG is 30 kA / 30 C / energy of 1 t of TNT. +CG is 10x that.
Direct hits are survived all the time by lightning rods for the past 275 years.
Long, unshielded lines of any sort can induce massive transient voltage transients (low current) that need to be protected with appropriate TVS circuits that will wear more in storm-prone areas. EMI from nearby lightning in unshielded computing systems with antennas or even without antennas can also be a factor.
walrus01
That's a freefly Alta X in the photos which is a $20k drone commonly used in cinematography.
iugtmkbdfil834
So.. how long do we have before situational personal lightning bolt is a thing?
Noumenon72
Apparently they already have the ability to create lightning bolts in the lab for testing. Maybe they can license that.
> we conducted artificial lightning tests on drones equipped with the lightning protection cage. The results showed that the system withstood artificial strikes of up to 150 kA—five times greater than the average natural lightning strike—without any malfunction or damage, covering over 98% of naturally occurring lightning conditions.
00N8
The future is now: Check out Lightning On Demand, https://lod.org/ (Tesla tower approach & scientific motivations) & https://youtu.be/lix-vr_AF38?si=w78LyF9tlxGJB8Ay (capacitor driven Lorentz plasma cannon demo)
null
dolphin0
Next step, use the energy?
ahahahahah
Yes, thanks for repeating the content from the article.
"In addition, we aim to not only trigger and control lightning, but also to harness its energy. Future efforts will focus on developing technologies for capturing and storing lightning energy for potential use (Figure 7)."
dinkblam
isn't conventional wisdom that this is "impossible" because you cannot charge batteries that fast?
borski
If the energy is going into batteries. It doesn’t necessarily have to.
Also, technology continues to improve, and this isn’t a “next year” thing.
fudged71
Like most things, you’d probably end up heating water somehow and using that energy.
Wow, getting a drone to survive the massive electromagnetic fields (and plasma!) around lightning strikes is quite an accomplishment. Prior art in the area used rockets trailing a similar light wire to trigger lightning - used by Dr Uman's team at University of Florida (https://ufdc.ufl.edu/UFE0047331/00001).