St. Elmo's Fires: the Spanish Air Force shows a phenomenon that Columbus already saw

"On the same Saturday night, St. Elmo's fire was seen, with seven candles lit, on top of the topsail. With a lot of rain and terrible thunder."

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The words with which this entry begins were written by Hernando Columbus, son of the famous discoverer, in the story of Christopher Columbus' second voyage to America. The famous admiral saw St. Elmo's fire on October 26, 1493. It was also seen by members of the Magellan-Elcano expedition 500 years ago on their voyage to circumnavigate the world. It is a phenomenon known since ancient Greece and has been called St. Elmo's fire for many years because he was the patron saint of sailors, since sailors considered these flashes a sign of good omen.

This phenomenon occurs during thunderstorms due to the ionization of the air. In 1899, the inventor Nikola Tesla managed to make his own St. Elmo's fire in his famous laboratory in Colorado Springs. The relationship between this phenomenon and aviation goes back a long way, and not always with good connotations. Some attributed the fire that destroyed the German airship Hindenburg in New Jersey on May 6, 1937 to St. Elmo's fire. The crew of the Boeing B-29 nicknamed "Bockscar" also saw it when they flew to the Japanese city of Nagasaki to drop the second atomic bomb.

Today the Air Force has published an interesting video showing the St. Elmo's Fires observed from the cockpit of a Dassault Falcon 900 of the 45th Air Force Group, a unit based in Torrejón de Ardoz and responsible for transporting VIPs. The images are certainly spectacular:

If you're still hungry for more, in this other video you can see St. Elmo's fires between a Boeing E-4 command aircraft and a Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker tanker aircraft of the United States Air Force (USAF) during an in-flight refueling operation. The St. Elmo's fires appeared at the end of the refueling boom that extends the tanker aircraft to the receiving aircraft: