Bolts from the blue can have long reach.Current U.S. Air Force operating procedures recommend that ground crews for aircraft and other personnel stop working outdoors when lightning is spotted within 5 nautical miles (nmi). However, a new analysis by the service suggests that that distance may not be adequate to fully protect the people or their planes. Todd M. McNamara, a meteorologist at the Air Force Institute of Technology The Naval Postgraduate School serves a similar purpose for the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps. The U.S. Army does not have a comparable school; Army officers study at the Naval Postgraduate School or AFIT. at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, U.S. military installation, 8,023 acres (3,247 hectares), W Ohio, NE of Dayton; est. 1917. One of the largest airport installations in the world, it is the air force's main research and development base, and the headquarters of the near Dayton, Ohio Dayton is a city in southwestern Ohio, United States. It is the county seat and largest city of Montgomery County. As of the 2005 census estimate, the population of Dayton was 158,873. , analyzed the path of more than 1.5 million cloud-to-ground lightning strikes around Florida's Kennedy Space Center Kennedy Space Center (Cape Canaveral) U.S. launch site for manned space missions. [U.S. Hist.: WB, So:562] See : Astronautics . A detection system there can map a lightning bolt's trajectory in three dimensions. Records from the network of instruments show that more than 30 percent of the cloud-to-ground strikes between March 1997 and December 2000 traveled horizontal distances of more than 5 nmi, or 9.25 kilometers, from their point of origin. The current safety limit was extended from 3 nmi in April 1996 after a bolt of lightning from a storm 5 nmi away killed one airman and injured several others refueling an aircraft at a base in the Florida panhandle The Florida Panhandle is the region of the state of Florida which includes the westernmost 16 counties in the state. It is a narrow strip lying between Alabama and Georgia to the north and the Gulf of Mexico to the south. . --S.P. |
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