Jetstar Dreamliner grounded after significant lightning damage

A Jetstar Boeing 787 will be out of service for several months after a lightning strike inflicted significant damage on the jet during a flight from Melbourne to the Gold Coast earlier this month.

Images obtained by this masthead show burn marks and dozens of small holes punctured on the underside of the Dreamliner’s fuselage, which airline crew discovered following a flight from Melbourne on May 7.

The Qantas-owned budget airline said planes are designed to withstand lightning strikes and continue to fly safely, and that “at no point was the safety of the aircraft compromised”.

Aircraft lightning strikes are a daily occurrence, with estimates that every passenger plane is hit once or twice every year, but they rarely result in damage.

Tim Collins, from aviation safety consultancy Upstream Aviation, said the extent of the damage on Jetstar’s plane was “really quite uncommon” and would take months to repair. “It’d be a safety issue if the aircraft was returned to service without being fixed, but … the aircraft could continue its flight without any issue,” he said.

There has not been a major civilian airliner crash attributed to a lightning strike anywhere in the world since 1988, according to the Flight Safety Foundation’s authoritative crash database.

Dr Geoffrey Dell, an aviation safety expert and air crash investigator, said electricity from strikes generally exited a plane from small rods on the wings’ trailing edges called “discharge wicks”, but that could not always be guaranteed, especially with large strikes.

“The static discharge system will deal with the maximum it’s capable of coping with, and then the rest goes somewhere else – that may have happened here,” he said.

The holes, burn marks and pitted patches of outer skin left on the Jetstar 787 were typical of lightning damage when it did occur, Dell said.