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Pan Am Flight 214 was a domestic scheduled passenger flight whose loss dispelled the myth that airliners in flight were impervious to damage from lightning strikes.
Story On December 8, 1963, the aircraft, a Pan Am Boeing 707-121 registered as , took off from Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in San Juan, Puerto Rico at 4:10 p.m. EST for a flight to Philadelphia with 73 passengers and 8 crew on board. At 7:35 p.m. EST, Flight 214 made an intermediate stop at Friendship International Airport (which is now called Baltimore-Washington International Airport) for refueling. At 8:24 p.m. EST, Flight 214 departed. Due to severe winds in the Philadelphia area, the crew chose to wait in a holding pattern with five other airplanes rather than attempt to land in Philadelphia.• At 8:58 p.m. EST, the aircraft, named Clipper Tradewind, was hit by lightning, which ignited fuel vapors in a reserve tank, causing an explosion. The crew of Flight 214 managed to send a final message - "Clipper Out Of Control" - before it crashed near Elkton, Maryland. All 81 people on board were killed instantly.• Cause It is believed the airliner was hit by positive lightning, a lightning strike where a cumulative positive charge is transferred from cloud-to-ground by a positively charged stepped leader, resulting in a more-powerful strike. This is different from the more common negative lightning (95 percent of strikes) where a cumulative negative charge is transferred. Positive lightning can also carry ten times the current of normal lightning. FAA reaction As a result of the crash of Flight 214, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered lightning discharge wicks to be installed on all commercial jets flying into U.S. airspace.• Guinness world record To this day (2006), the crash of Pan Am Flight 214 is registered in the Guinness Book of World Records as the worst death toll in history from a lightning strike. * Yet at least one other deadly crash, LANSA Flight 508, was caused by lightning (in 1971) and has no mention in the Guinness Book of World Records, despite having more casualties (91 fatalities). See also | ||||||||
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