- Scientists and engineers at the Japanese telecommunications company Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) successfully triggered a lightning strike using a drone.
- To do this, the team designed a lightning-resistant cage to house the drone and used conductive wires and high voltage switches to trigger a lightning strike near the drone at will.
- The near-term hope is to use drones to protective sensitive equipment and communities during severe weather, but NTT also thinks that this technology could one day capture the energy from the lightning as a potential renewable energy source.
As Doc Brown so eloquently noted in Back to the Future, the problem with lightning is that you never know when or where it’s going to strike. That description might’ve been sufficient back in 1955, but in 2025, things have changed.
Earlier this month, the Japanese telecommunications company Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) successfully used a drone equipped with a lightning-proof cage to essentially summon lightning in an effort to mitigate damage from an incoming thunderstorm. According to NTT, lightning causes up to 200 billion yen ($1.4 billion) damage a year, so using these lightning drones could go a long way towards protecting sensitive equipment and population centers during severe weather events.
Between December of 2024 and January of 2025, NTT conducted lightning-triggering experiments at around 3,000 feet of elevation in Hamada City, located in a mountainous region roughly 63 miles north of Hiroshima. The designers of the experiment needed to achieve two not-so-easy feats simultaneously: they needed to design a cage that can withstand extreme energy and temperature delivered by lightning strikes, and they needed a way to trigger the lightning in the first place.
To address the first problem, The NTT team created a conductive shield that directs the lightning strike away from the drone’s internal components. The cage wasn’t built to protect some kind of specialized drone—in fact, it’s designed to fit snugly on a typical, commercially-available drone. Because the shield distributes that lightning strike radially, the resulting magnetic fields also won’t interfere with the drone’s operation. After conducting some artificial lightning tests, the cage withstood 150 kiloamperes (kA), which is five times greater than your typical lightning strike, according to NTT.
The second—and arguably more complicated—problem was instigating the lightning strike in the first place, as a small drone wouldn’t be nearly enough to trigger a lightning strike. To fix this problem, the team tethered the drone to the ground with a conductive wire, and once an increase in electric field strength (indicative of a coming storm) was detected, engineers turned on a high-voltage switch that rapidly altered the electric field around the drone. This essentially encouraged lightning to discharge near the drone as the storm passed through the area.
On December 13, a field mill—an instrument used to measure electric fields in the atmosphere—picked up the approach of a coming storm. With the drone deployed, NTT flipped a switch that delivered 2,000 volts flowing between the wire and the ground. Shortly after, a lightning strike was recorded near the drone. While NTT hopes that better lightning detection will help safeguard communities during lightning storms, the team also sees other future benefits to this research.
“We aim to not only trigger and control lightning, but also to harness its energy,” the team said in a press release. “Future efforts will focus on developing technologies for capturing and storing lightning energy for potential use.”
Now all we need is a flux capacitor.
Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.
