I've observed St. Elmo's on many occassions, and in many forms. It's cool when it's dancing on the outside of the windscreen, and awesome when it dances in a little ball down the center of the cockpit on the floor. But the coolest form I've seen happened during a night A/R in the midwest.
We were scheduled for a typical Air Refueling leg where we'd A) onload enough JP-4 to continue our scheduled mission and B) get plenty of practice contacts. It was dark, and clear, but we were paralleled on both sides by lines of thunderstorms. While we were well clear of them, we could see the occassional flash of light in our peripheral vision. The plan was to go to full tanks on the first contact, back out, let the "CO" get the first practice contact, swap practice contacts after that, and top off as we reached the end of the track. I got the initial offload, backed out, gave it to the CO, and he stabilized and started easing forward. About the time the KC-135's boom was pointed directly at our long nose, a thin blue streak of light connected the tip of the boom to our airplane. As we eased forward, the size of the light increased, so when it was pointed at the metal beam between the two front windows, a "tube" of light resembling a Star Wars light sabre connected our jets. It looked like a blue glowing plasma, alomst straight, but bending and wobbling a bit. It was smooth, not jagged, and by this time about 8 inches in diameter and perhaps 12-15 feet long. While it looked pretty harmless, it occurred to me that it was headed towards our wide open air refueling receptacle. I told the "CO" to go ahead and back on out, reached up and rested my hand on his on the throttles to verify the throttles were easing back, and told the boom we'd be backing out. The boom operator was practically speechless, and I guess I can understand why. When I let him know that I figured we already had enough gas for the night and we'd just be goin' on our way, he was stuttering but obviously relieved. "I was just gonna say 'Breakaway' when you said that, sir, but I could barely breathe."
I doubt it would have resulted in any harm, but I don't regret playing it safe. This way I KNOW I can tell you about the cool St. Elmo's I saw that night.
I kept waiting for it to arc into my eyeball or something, because I had never seen cover the entire windshield in a Lear before. But the most spectacular part was the arc off of the nose. There was a big bolt of it shooting off the nose to about 8 feet in front of the plane into a "dish" of static electricity. It looked almost exactly like on Back to Future, when the car hit 88 mph and all of that electricity was shooting in front of it. It definitely got our attention, and added to the many stories of flying freight at night.
