A striking experience - Tony Cunnane's Afterthoughts

Written on 18 February 2011

I looked outside several times last night but there was 8/8ths cloud cover and so no hope of seeing the Northern Lights that had been forecast – something to do with the exceptionally large solar flares that have been observed by professional astronomers in recent days. Whilst gazing vacantly at the dark overcast I was reminded of an incident about 40 years ago when I first came into contact with St Elmo’s Fire – and I do mean contact.

My Victor Tanker crew had departed late one evening from Goose Bay, Labrador for a flight across the North Atlantic back to our home base at RAF Marham in Norfolk. The Met Officer had warned us that we could expect extensive cumulo-nimbus (thunderstorm) cloud all the way up to 35,000 feet more of less from take-off and for the first hour of our flight. Because of that we flight planned to climb to and maintain 43,000 feet and use the most northerly of the approved Great Circle routes across the Atlantic Ocean. That had the added advantage that we would have stronger tail winds from the high level jet stream, and, therefore, a shorter transit time home.

We crossed the Canadian coast shortly after take-off heading initially towards the southern tip of Greenland and thence via Iceland to the north of Scotland. Since Goose Bay at 53.19 degrees North and RAF Marham at 52.65 degrees North are roughly on the same line of latitude, that may seem a long way round but that’s an illusion caused by the Mercator’s Projection of the maps we normally look at. We were flying a Great Circle track – that’s the shortest distance between two points. Theoretically, to fly a Great Circle at that latitude we would have to be in a very, very gentle but continuous turn to the right. Since that is an impracticable way to fly, the navigator had planned a series of straight legs with course changes every 10 degrees of longitude. However, I’m a pilot so I relied on my navigator to deal with the Great Circles!

At our cruising level I, and my co-pilot when he was awake, occasionally saw the clouds beneath us lit up brightly by lightning flashes within them but where we were, well above all the cloud, we were in smooth, clear air. Our part of the cabin was in complete darkness except for the instrument lights – no digital displays in those days. A full-length curtain shielded the rear crew members from us so that their lights, which they need for doing their work, did not affect our night vision. It  was actually rather boring!

Suddenly I thought I could see through the small window on my left the first faint signs of the Northern Lights due north of our position. I pointed with my left hand to draw my co-pilot’s attention. As the tip of my left index finger, which was covered as it always was in flight by the standard issue white cape leather flying glove, touched the windscreen it, my finger, immediately lit up and glowed white. I withdrew my finger, startled, but the white substance remained attached to my finger tip. My co-pilot said something like, "What're you doing, Captain?" That, naturally attracted the attention of the three rear crew members who all immediately wanted to know what was going on ‘up front’. The co-pilot and I both noticed then that a white fluorescent glow was slowly but inexorably spreading across the windscreen and along the instrument panel.

I had vaguely heard of St Elmo’s Fire but I had never experienced it before. I found that I could ‘wipe’ more of the white luminous plasma onto my glove but then I discovered that I couldn’t get rid of it. The more I tried to wipe it off, the more of it gathered on my glove. After a few minutes it started to fade – from my glove and from the windscreen and soon everything was back to normal. Only then did it occur to me that it might have been wiser not to gather the stuff on my flying glove in the first place. However, I never felt any electrical tingle so I assumed that the electrical bonding that all aircraft have to protect them from lightning strikes had done what it was supposed to do.

We didn’t see any sign of the Northern Lights and by the time we got close to Greenland full cloud cover had developed beneath again. We saw nothing of Iceland or the north of Scotland – indeed we didn’t even see the ground until we were about five miles from touch down at Marham.

Recently I trawled the Internet for information about St Elmo’s Fire. There’s masses of material available but here are a couple of sentences I found:

. . . . Physically, St. Elmo's fire is a bright blue or violet glow, appearing like fire in some circumstances, from tall, sharply pointed structures such as rods, and on wings. Conditions that can generate St Elmo's fire are present during thunderstorms, when high voltage is present between clouds and the ground underneath, electrically charged. Air molecules glow due to the effects of such voltage, producing St Elmo's fire. St Elmo is " a mispronunciation of St. Ermo or St. Erasmus, the patron saint of Mediterranean sailors. They believed the fire was a sign of salvation from the saint, since the phenomenon occurs most often toward the end of a storm.