Anyone experienced St Elmo's Fire?

[CaptBuzzard]

I experienced it for the first time flying a C-402 early yesterday morning. I was in the clouds around 4am and it happened. What a killer experience.

 

[airgator]

So what exactly did it look like? Did you hear strange sounds as it was occurring?

 

[avbug]

Usually when I see it it's around 18,000' in a climb or descent. usually in dry air or low humidity, with ash or dust present. Often close to electrical activity, such as in the vicinity of embedded storms of thundercells.

Sometimes it creates a strong static hiss in the radio or ICS, sometimes not. It appears sometimes as a dancing glow of blue or green on the windscreen, and can be seen as sparks spraying from small protrusions and fiberglass/plastic parts. Sometimes surfaces glow, sometimes they have a "flame" that dances around, sometimes the outline of a part or area glows.

The effect can be quite beautiful to watch.

 

[Beechnut]

I have seen it numerous times at night. Recently we saw it in the CRJ as we were going around some weather. It was the common purple haze around the front windscreen, but then was discharged every few seconds by bolts that were very bright and looked like lightning that branched from the top of the windscreen to the bottom. Very neat!


S.

 

[buzzer]

Seen it many times. Several times on the 727 when it starts to get bad (entire windscreen webbed with miniture lightning), you would get one or even two large "spotlight lights" beam into space at a 50-60 deg. angle from the nose right in frot of you. You put your face up to the windscreen and just look up into space at the beam/beams pointing up. You have to slow down a little or put out some speed brakes to calm it down lest you have a static discharge that will scare the sh*t out of you. I had one of those once and a blue bolt went right down the isle and made for some green faced pax. It blinded all three of us in the cockpit and we thought an engine blew. Yes, all three of us said "Oh sh*t" at the same time.

 

[Simon Says]

I have never seen it on the windscreen of the Saab, but I have seen it a number of times on the tip of the props. Which creats a glowing circle as the props spin. The passengers love it. The color is always blue. Does anybody have any other colors to report possibly on different types of aircraft.

 

[TurboS7]

The other night we were flying fire fighters to Medford, Ore. We were somewhere in the midwest and the purser served us "lunch"(it was in the middle of the night). I put mine up on the dash as I was too busy doing nothing to eat. We got into some fairly good St. Elmo's, not bad I have seen a lot worse. But what was neat was that the little jags of lightning were coming out all around my lunch. I even called the purser back in to show him how we microwave our lunch's at night. I wish I had a video of it,it looked pretty neat.

THe neatest St. Elmo's is in a Lear. You get 4 beams of light off the nose and 8 more off the respective wing tanks. Then your radios go completly dead, the best St. Elmo's can be found at 410 to 450 in the vicinity of a tropical storm or hurricane.

 

[TurboS7]

The only color I have ever seen was blue. The other night I was night fishing for muskie in Northern Wisc. About 1A.M. my wife wanted to go in for a potty break, then she decided to hang it up for the night as she was cold. So I dropped her off and went back out on the lake my self. I was just drift fishing with suckers(12 inches). The starts were out of this world, then I saw something that I have never seen before. Spending time in AK and Iceland I have seen the Northern Light a bunch of time. This time I saw something diffrent. The Northern Lights formed a "rainbow" and underneath it you could see the curvature of the earth. What was really weird was that you couldn't see any stars underneath the rainbow, like the earth's shadow blocked it all out. I went back to the house and woke up my oldest daughter who was sleeping out in the tent(23 year old Norweigian blond)she thought it was really cool too. You never get tired of seeing neat things in the universe, God did a good job of putting it together.
We used to fly the astronauts to Moscow years ago and I asked them if after they were in space did they have any questions about a God. They said no way, they said the view will make any agnostic a theistic person in no time.Once you have been up there you are never satified with the view from down here.

 

[OakRBust]

I am with Simon. It glows big blue circles around the propellors. I have had it in the Saab only about 5 times in 6+ years. Each time it dances blue patches along the windshield as well. The prop sure is a sight!!

Oak

 

[414Flyer]

The only color I have ever seen was blue. The other night I was night fishing for muskie in Northern Wisc. About 1A.M. my wife wanted to go in for a potty break, then she decided to hang it up for the night as she was cold. So I dropped her off and went back out on the lake my self. I was just drift fishing with suckers(12 inches). The starts were out of this world, then I saw something that I have never seen before. Spending time in AK and Iceland I have seen the Northern Light a bunch of time. This time I saw something diffrent. The Northern Lights formed a "rainbow" and underneath it you could see the curvature of the earth. What was really weird was that you couldn't see any stars underneath the rainbow, like the earth's shadow blocked it all out. I went back to the house and woke up my oldest daughter who was sleeping out in the tent(23 year old Norweigian blond)she hought it was really cool too.

Hey, you never told us you have a blonde 23 year old daughter

I have seen St Elmos several times, usually it was while flying thru dry snow, or ice particles. Sometimes I saw the purplish glow on the prop tips, and twice in a T-210, I saw it making that beam off of the OAT probe thru windscreen.

I did see it the other night while flying near some small storms in AZ too, probably getting enough static off of the precip and lighting going on.