{"id":58379,"date":"2020-11-18T17:13:23","date_gmt":"2020-11-18T16:13:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/?p=58379"},"modified":"2025-01-21T22:19:22","modified_gmt":"2025-01-21T21:19:22","slug":"st-elmos-fires-the-spanish-air-force-shows-a-phenomenon-that-columbus-already-saw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/2020\/11\/18\/st-elmos-fires-the-spanish-air-force-shows-a-phenomenon-that-columbus-already-saw\/","title":{"rendered":"St. Elmo's Fires: the Spanish Air Force shows a phenomenon that Columbus already saw"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><en>\"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.\"<\/em><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><rel><a href=\"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/2020\/10\/05\/ascua-the-story-of-the-first-official-aerobatic-patrol-of-the-spanish-air-force\/\">Ascua: the story of the first official aerobatic patrol of the Spanish Air Force<\/a><\/rel><br \/>\n<rel><a href=\"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/2023\/03\/22\/the-most-curious-of-the-uses-of-german-highways-as-military-airstrips\/\">The most curious of the uses of German highways as military airstrips<\/a><\/rel><\/p>\n<p><strong>The words with which this entry begins were written by Hernando Columbus<\/strong>, son of the famous discoverer, in the story of Christopher Columbus' second voyage to America. <strong>The famous admiral saw St. Elmo's fire on October 26, 1493. It was also seen by members of the Magellan-Elcano expedition<\/strong> 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>This phenomenon occurs during thunderstorms due to the ionization of the air. <strong>In 1899, the inventor Nikola Tesla managed to make his own St. Elmo's fire<\/strong> 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. <strong>Some attributed the fire that destroyed the German airship Hindenburg<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n<p>Today <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/EjercitoAire\/status\/1328975251410194433\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">the Air Force has published an interesting video<\/a> showing the <strong>St. Elmo's Fires observed from the cockpit of a Dassault Falcon 900 of the 45th Air Force Group<\/strong>, a unit based in Torrej\u00f3n de Ardoz and responsible for transporting VIPs. <strong>The images are certainly spectacular:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"665\" height=\"374\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/lUDLS1P5Lgg\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>If you're still hungry for more, in this other video you can see <strong>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)<\/strong> 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:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"665\" height=\"374\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/XpgVIGHfL0A\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00abOn the same Saturday night, St. Elmo&#8217;s fire was seen, with seven candles lit, on top of the topsail. With a lot of rain and terrible thunder.\u00bb<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[8169,14459,6757,11055,12262,1743,11875,23550],"class_list":["post-58379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aviacion-militar","tag-45-grupo-de-fuerzas-aereas","tag-boeing-e-4","tag-boeing-kc-135-stratotanker","tag-christopher-columbus","tag-dassault-falcon-900","tag-nikola-tesla","tag-spanish-air-force","tag-st-elmos-fires"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-12 00:35:45","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58379\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}