What makes lightening strike an aircraft in mid air?

Question

I dont want an answer like, it just can ok

Answer 1

if you dont want an answer then why post the qustion happens often to planes as far as i am aware

Answer 2

As the aircraft moves through the air it picks up a static charge. The drier and dustier the air, the greater the charge is picked up.
Normally, even small aircraft can generate a charge that is significant enough to mess around with their radios and avionics, so most aircraft have the short little wires (about 4 inches long) that extend aft of the wing and other surfaces to attempt to dissipate the built up charge into the atmosphere.
Also, operation of electronics like radar creates a charge.
I have gotten a shock from touching an aircraft that had just landed on a cold winter day when I was servicing it, so they can build up some pretty large charges.

Most lightning does not strike the ground. Most of it jumps from one part of the cloud to another, or from one cloud to another.
What makes lightning arc, is a buildup of positive or negative charge in one area. (This comes from the rising and falling of the air within a thunderstorm cloud.) When this charge gets big enough, it releases in a lightning bolt to equalize the charge between the high and low areas.

So, along comes our unfortunate little airplane.
It is flying in the dry air of the midwest and has built up a bit of a static charge. The pilot sees some storms ahead and flips on the weather radar to try and fly around the storms.
A few minutes later the radome gets blasted by a lightning strike.
Strikes typically hit the pointy bits of the aircraft (like the nose or wingtips) because at these points the charge of the aircraft is concentrated into the smallest area, creating the largest charge density.

Aircraft are designed to be electrically conductive so the lightning runs through the aircraft and dissipates out the other side, usually with little effect except a pretty scary FLASH CRACK BANG! The electronics systems are designed to be tolerant of lightning strikes and typically reset with no effect.
But whenever you put a few tens of thousands of volts through delicate electronics you might get some wierd effects.
The better the conductivity of the airframe, the less structural effect there will be because the lightning has less electrical resistance as it flows through the structure.

Answer 3

There are two reasons lightining strikes airplanes. Most airplanes are conductive, and therefore, it's easier for lightining to go a little out of it's way to go through the airplane then to go in a straight line. Basically, it takes millions of volts of potentail to jump an airliner sized gap in the atmosphere, and only a few volts to move current through an airplane. The second problem is that as airplanes move through the air, they can pick up a static charge, incrasesing the potential for a lighting strike. This is why airplanes have "static wicks" on trailing edges, to bleed static electricity back into the atmosphere.

It's pretty exciting to be in an airplane during a lightning strike. Sometimes there's no damage, and sometimes piecese of the airplane are missing and electronics are fried.