EP1 – History of Lightning Protection & Boeing’s Recent Troubles
In episode one, lightning protection expert Allen Hall discusses advances in aircraft lightning protection throughout aviation history. We also dive into Boeing's recent trouble with the 737 Max and what this means for the aviation industry. Podcast Transcript Dan: Welcome this is the first episode of the Struck Podcast I'm your co-host Dan Blewett and I am joined here by lightning protection expert Allen Hall. Allen how are you? Allen: Hey Dan, how are you doing? Dan: Doing well, doing well So we are here both self isolating in separate cities. I'm here in Washington DC and you're in the on the border of Vermont over on the Massachusetts side. So yeah how's everything going up there? Allen: It's snowing we're gonna get eight inches of snow today. It's one of those freak March storms. I guess is today the first day of spring? It's got to be close to it right? Dan: Yeah yeah Allen: But we're so far north it's still winter time until about mid April so we're sort of self isolating via snowstorm today Dan: Gotcha. So here on the struck podcast we're gonna talk about everything aviation lightning protection because Allen here is the CEO of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, which is a lightning protection company and you've been in this industry for over twenty plus years Allen: Yeah Dan: Lightning protection in both the aviation industry and on wind turbine so you've seen a lot of the evolution of this in the field. Allen: Oh yeah we've seen a lot of changes in my lifetime and it's one of those things that we've been doing some research on here in our company and kind of going back through some of the history and it's fascinating to see how much has changed in the last 50 years from airplanes falling out of the sky, big airplanes falling out of the sky, to where we are now, which it's a pretty rare event which is where it's way it should be right I mean we should be evolving over time getting smarter and learning you know what's right and what's wrong and we've made huge progress but it doesn't mean there's not a lot more to go and there is. Dan: Yeah and you know we think of all these different modes of transportation and we think of flying being this big scary thing because we're obviously huge you know so heavy bird up in the sky but yet they're incredibly safe and I think that's owed to all the engineers and the regulations and you know with even just the little things you have swapping out a new part for a plane maybe one that wears out like there's just a lot of steps you have to go to to just make sure the new part that goes in there is as good or better as the previous and you can't just throw anything on there there's no cobbling together an airplane like you could maybe a used car Allen: Right Dan: and that's really there's a lot of sense. Allen: Yeah just because the safety aspects involved and it's a combination of obviously the people who design airplanes getting smarter and having a lot of computational ability helps in that and then just the process has changed over time where we're much more focused on looking at safety and looking at probabilities of safety and in delving deep deep deep into systems and deep deep deep into aircraft structure and to test it and make sure that it's going to do what we think it's going to do as we go forward. So there's tons and tons and thousands and thousands and thousands of man-hours that go into making an airplane anymore and in you know roughly a pretty much any airplane program it's going to be several hundred million dollars to billions of dollars to get developed before it first even really gets out in the field. There's a lot of money, a lot of effort to make those airplane safe, thank goodness. Dan: Yeah and so for you as a lightning protection expert you know where does this all start? I know that one of the first recorded lightning strikes on aircraft was on a German Zeppelin back in 1915 and the thing just basically just got...