St. Elmo’s Fire

St. Elmo’s Fire outside the cockpit of a 747 over the Atlantic in 2017

(Credit: personal photo by the pilot, Christiaan van Heijst)

A weather phenomenon which sometimes occurs when vehicles move through electrically-charged clouds that causes visible static discharges and sometimes cause the wings of planes or the masts of ships to glow blue.

See 2:25 in this video.

Why I Looked It Up

I was watching an episode of Buck Rogers where a shuttle had lost power and was crashing. Buck said, “It might be St. Elmo’s Fire!” I thought this was ridiculous (as is most of the “science” in that show), but based on what I read, this might have been accurate.

Of course, that caught my ear because of the 1985 movie called St. Elmo’s Fire. This was a classic Brat Pack movie that I finally watched in 2020 when I had COVID. I’m sad to report that it was awful. St. Elmo’s Fire is mentioned in that movie, but it had no bearing on the plot, that I could tell.

Postscript

I found a reference in Shogun, which was set in 1600. During a storm, a sailor said:

“…it wasn’t in our orders to sail into the unknown. We should be back home by now, safe, with our bellies full, not chasing St. Elmo’s fire.”

Interestingly, the Wikipedia page for the subject notes this:

Accounts of Magellan’s first circumnavigation of the globe refer to St. Elmo’s fire (calling it the body of St. Anselm) being seen around the fleet’s ships multiple times off the coast of South America. The sailors saw these as favorable omens.

In Shogun, that’s exactly where the ship was – it had just passed through the Strait of Magellan and was sailing north up the coast of Chile.

(Is this a mistake? Should the character have said “…not chasing St. Anselm”? Magellan sailed in the 1520s, so perhaps the name changed in the intervening 80 years.)