In a groundbreaking development, Japanese tech big NTT has developed a drone able to triggering and surviving lightning strikes, a feat demonstrated throughout checks in December 2024 and January 2025. NTT’s announcement particulars the drone’s capacity to induce lightning at 300 meters (984 toes), providing a novel strategy to mitigating the estimated ¥100 billion to ¥200 billion ($700 million to $1.4 billion) in annual lightning-related harm in Japan.
Technical Innovation: A Drone Designed for Lightning
NTT’s take a look at drone, outfitted with a protecting cage and a conductive wire tethered to a ground-based winch, represents a big engineering achievement. The wire, related to a change, generated a voltage exceeding 2,000 volts throughout a thunderstorm, making a localized electrical subject. “This fast enhance in native electrical subject energy triggered a lightning strike directed on the drone,” NTT reported. The strike produced a loud crack, a flash on the winch, and partial melting of the cage, but the drone remained operational.
The cage’s design is vital to its success. It redirects excessive lightning currents away from inner parts, stopping harm, and distributes the present radially to reduce electromagnetic interference. This configuration permits the drone to “proceed to fly stably even after the lightning strike,” in keeping with NTT. Notably, the cage might be retrofitted to commercially out there drones, enhancing scalability.
Trade Context: A Shift in Lightning Safety
Conventional lightning rods, whereas efficient for fastened constructions, lack the flexibleness to guard sprawling city areas or distant infrastructure. NTT’s drone-based answer addresses this hole by enabling focused lightning induction in various places. The corporate envisions fleets of those drones patrolling cities throughout storms, triggering managed strikes to stop pure lightning from damaging vital property like energy substations or communication networks.
Lightning strikes trigger important financial and operational disruptions globally. In Japan, annual damages vary from $700 million to $1.4 billion, whereas occasions just like the 2019 lightning-induced substation fireplace that disrupted London’s Heathrow Airport spotlight the vulnerability of infrastructure. NTT’s strategy may redefine lightning safety, notably in areas with excessive thunderstorm exercise.
Regulatory and Market Issues
Deploying lightning-triggering drones raises complicated regulatory questions. Airspace administration throughout thunderstorms, already restricted resulting from security issues, would require new protocols to accommodate drone fleets. Japan’s Civil Aviation Bureau, which oversees drone operations, has but to deal with such specialised functions. Internationally, requirements from our bodies just like the Worldwide Civil Aviation Group may affect adoption.
Market potential hinges on value and scalability. Retrofitting industrial drones with NTT’s cage may decrease obstacles to entry, however working fleets at scale calls for important funding in infrastructure, coaching, and upkeep. Opponents within the drone sector, resembling DJI or Parrot, might discover related applied sciences, intensifying innovation on this area of interest.
DroneXL’s Take: A Daring however Difficult Imaginative and prescient
NTT’s lightning-triggering drone is a exceptional technological leap, mixing drone engineering with atmospheric science. Its capacity to outlive a direct strike underscores the robustness of the design, and the retrofit functionality positions it as a sensible answer for present drone fleets. Nevertheless, skepticism is warranted concerning its scalability. A single storm can produce tons of of hundreds of strikes—878,000 in a single U.S. occasion in 2025—making complete safety of city areas a logistical problem. Regulatory hurdles and the necessity for real-time storm monitoring additional complicate deployment. Whereas NTT’s imaginative and prescient is formidable, its success will depend upon rigorous testing, cost-effective scaling, and navigating a posh regulatory panorama. For drone professionals, this innovation indicators a brand new frontier in specialised functions, however its real-world influence stays to be seen.
Pictures courtesy of NTT
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