Lightning strikes commercial jets routinely; engineering keeps passengers safe

Every year, the aircraft carrying millions of passengers through the sky is almost certainly struck by lightning — not as a catastrophe narrowly avoided, but as an event so thoroughly anticipated that engineers have woven its management into the very bones of the machine. Modern aviation has taken one of nature's most primal forces and reclassified it: not a threat to be feared, but a design load to be absorbed. In doing so, it offers a quiet lesson about how human ingenuity can domesticate the wild without pretending it does not exist.