When a bolt of lightning cracked through the sky over Japan last December, it didn’t come by chance. It came because a drone asked for it.
On a stormy day, engineers at Japan’s Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) launched a small aircraft into the darkening clouds. Tethered to the ground by a long metal wire, the drone hovered silently at 300 meters. And then, in a blink, it summoned the heavens.
The strike was immediate, electric blue, and powerful enough to melt part of the drone’s protective cage. But the drone kept flying.
“The world’s first successful lightning induction using a drone,” NTT declared.
The experiment, which was only recently revealed to the public, marks a new chapter in humanity’s relationship with one of nature’s most dangerous and least controllable forces.
Turning Thunderclouds Into Targets
Each year, lightning costs billions in property damage across the globe and injuries to thousands of people. In Japan alone, annual lightning-related losses reach up to $1.4 billion. Lightning may not strike the same place twice, but it tends to hit the same areas, and it doesn’t discriminate between rural landscapes and high-tech infrastructure.
Traditional lightning rods offer important protection. But they’re fixed, limited in range, and impractical for locations like wind farms or outdoor stadiums. So NTT took to the skies with a bold idea: build a flying lightning rod that can go closer to the storms.
At the heart of their system is a multicopter drone, rigged with a custom-built Faraday cage (an enclosure used to block some electromagnetic fields). The drone was also armed with protruding spiky antennas to invite a strike. It’s connected to the ground by a 300-meter conductive wire, which plays the role of safe conductor.
The system uses ground-based sensors to detect when conditions are ripe—electric field fluctuations, usually the harbinger of lightning. When the moment is right, the drone launches, ascends into the cloud field, and, when the voltage reaches a critical level, a switch connects the tether to a low-resistance grounding system. The path to Earth becomes irresistible for the charged particles above.
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Blue flashes of lightning and “popping sounds” erupted from the ground winch, the researchers reported, as the pulse of energy shot from sky to soil.
Remarkably, the drone remained stable and airborne, even after the lightning scorched its protective cage. NTT says the drone’s frame had already been tested to withstand surges up to 150,000 amps. For reference, a typical lightning bolt carries around 30,000 amps—more than enough to obliterate most electronics in its path.
The Wild Dream of Bottling Lightning
While the notion of summoning lightning may sound like something from mythology, the implications are decidedly practical. By guiding lightning, these drones could offer real-time protection to vulnerable sites—from power plants and airports to concert venues and offshore platforms.
NTT sees a future where networks of these drones act as mobile lightning shields, dispatched to areas at risk, ready to intercept strikes before they hit critical structures.
And yet, the engineers are dreaming bigger. Much bigger.
“We will also work on research and development into methods for storing lightning energy,” reads a company press release, “with the aim of storing and utilizing the energy of induced lightning.”
The ambition is bold. One lightning strike carries about a billion Joules of energy—enough to charge an electric car multiple times. Multiply that by the 1.4 billion strikes that occur worldwide each year, and you get a staggering 383.6 terawatt-hours. That’s around 1.5% of global electricity consumption.
But there’s a catch. Well, several, actually.
The energy in lightning is delivered almost instantaneously—like trying to fill a water balloon using a fire hydrant. Most conventional batteries would explode before absorbing even a fraction of that power. Even high-capacity ultracapacitors, the best bet for such a task, are massive and unwieldy. And plugging that much voltage straight into the power grid is a recipe for blown transformers and flaming substations.
Yet, the prospect warrants further investigation, researchers say.
A New Tool for Safer Skies
For now, the company imagines a future where networks of these drones can be deployed quickly ahead of storms. They would act as temporary, mobile lightning rods, offering targeted protection where and when it’s needed most.
NTT is also exploring whether it’s possible to store the energy from the strikes. But we’ve discussed capturing it and it’s not easy. Right now, there’s no practical way to store lightning energy safely and efficiently. Most systems would be overwhelmed by the sudden spike in voltage and current. So while energy harvesting may be a long-term goal, the drone’s main promise today is safety, not power.
Still, by helping us understand how to trigger and control lightning, the experiment opens up new possibilities. And that’s a step forward in dealing with one of nature’s most unpredictable forces.
