.
.
One jet meets another

Oct. 25, 2019: When you see lightning, run! So NOAA advises in lightning safety brochures. On Oct. 15th, however, pilot Chris Holmes had no place to go when lightning started to crackle in thunderstorms around his aircraft. Like it or not, he was in position for a close encounter … with a Gigantic Jet.

“I was flying 35,000 feet over the Gulf of Mexico near the Yucatan Peninsula when a super cell started pulsing with light,” he says. “It wasn’t just ordinary lightning, though. The cell was also creating lots of sprites and jets. They were leaping up from the thunderhead.”

At a distance of only 35 miles, he video-recorded a towering Gigantic Jet:

“It was the most amazing thing I’ve seen in my aviation career,” he says.

Sometimes called “Earth’s tallest lightning,” Gigantic Jets were discovered in 2001-2002 shooting out of thunderstorms near Taiwan and Puerto Rico. Since then…