Indeed they do. If you get a chance to really look through an aircraft, you'll see tons of grounding straps on a lot of components, even control surfaces.turbo-1 said:I may be off base, here, but don't aircraft accumulate static charges just from moving through the air? Nothing to do with tires, etc, but the movement of air along the hull. They made a big deal about that in Hunt for the Red October, and Tom Clancy is usually a stickler for details.
The bit in Hunt ... is pretty accurate, one of the things you learn on a air-sea resuce course is never to grab hold of a basket being lowered by a helicopter, let the grounding straps touch the boat first.FredGarvin said:Helicopters also generate tremendous static build up.
We would laugh a lot because every once in a while there would be someone who would be hooking up our external loads who would not use or improperly use their grounding straps. Most of the time it was a natural tendency of the person on the ground to think that they could grab one of the hooks and pull the helicopter over to where they were to make the hook up easier and faster.mgb_phys said:The bit in Hunt ... is pretty accurate, one of the things you learn on a air-sea resuce course is never to grab hold of a basket being lowered by a helicopter, let the grounding straps touch the boat first.
I assumed that especially for WW2 era prop driven planes flying at lower altitudes through weather the static build up was bad and there was a risk of sparks when the wheels touched and so having them filled with an inflammable gas was a 'theoretical' safety feature.