St. Elmo's Fire

This is the Embraer EMB-145, the kind of jet my friend flies.

A good friend of mine from my airline days sent me this story. The normal flying time from Green Bay to Chicago is about 45 minutes or less. I think. I never flew this jet. Explanatory notes are in parentheses.

"Hey Carl.

Flew through a batch of November storms coming back from Green Bay Saturday night. In six years of flying the Embraer (Embraer 145, a small jet airliner), I've never seen the magic blue discharge. It was all over the nose Saturday night though. F/O (Co-pilot) first saw it on the #3 pitot in front on his side, then it was visible at the base of the windshields, then a little horizontal band on my side window. Took us nearly two hours in a jet to get from Green Bay to ORD (Chicago O'Hare). Smooth sailing till west of MKE (Milwaukee) then had to head SW (southwest) to a point SW of RFD (Rockford, IL) to round the first line, then a 180 (180 degree turn) to the NE (northeast) to almost the Wisconsin border to get round the north end of the second line. Then a little holding at Teddy, then Krena (Teddy and Krena are holding points for traffic going into O'Hare), the the 170 knot crawl to 9R (the runway they landed on at O'Hare). What fun. Getting kicked hard the whole way. I don't think I've had that much fun since the ATR (a large turboprop airliner, a lot slower than a jet) days."

He didn't mention if the storms were simple thunderstorms or thundersnowstorms. Thundersnowstorms are really spectacular. The only time I ever saw St. Elmo's fire was in a thundersnowstorm. It was quite a sight to see; Chicago at night covered in snow, lightning all around, flying through snow showers in an airplane glowing partly blue. Then we landed in South Bend and got snowed in for 2 days.

You can tell from my friends errant flight path that I'm not the only pilot around who will go way the hell out of the way to stay out of storms.