Red Sprites: The Lightning Above Storms Pilots Reported for Decades

by Connor Kerr | Oct 2, 2026 | Monde de l'aviation | 0 comments

Victims and police response

For decades, some pilots who flew near big thunderstorms at night came home with a story they were reluctant to tell.

Above the storm, well above the cloud tops where lightning has no business being, they had seen flashes of light shooting upward into the dark.

Scientists were sceptical. There was no photograph, no instrument reading, and many pilots preferred not to put it in writing.

Then, on 6 July 1989, a camera caught one by accident.

Today astronauts on the International Space Station photograph them from above, and a widely shared Instagram post of red sprites seen from the ISS has brought them back into the spotlight.

They are real, they are enormous, and aviation played a bigger part in proving it than most people realise.

Sprites belong to a family of phenomena called transient luminous events, or TLEs.