What happened
On December 4, 2003, a Kato Airline Dornier 228-202, registration LN-HTA, was performing a scheduled flight from Røst to Bodø. During the approach, the aircraft encountered intense lightning activity. A massive lightning strike hit the nose of the aircraft and traveled toward the tail. The electrical surge was so powerful that it burned through bonding wires between the fuselage and the tail, as well as the connection between the tail surface and the elevator. The energy caused a rod end to break loose in the elevator control rod, severing the physical connection between the cockpit controls and the elevator.
Following the strike, the crew experienced approximately 30 seconds of vision loss due to being blinded by the flash. While the pilots were able to use the electric pitch trim to maintain some longitudinal control, the loss of the elevator made the aircraft difficult to stabilize. During the first landing attempt, the aircraft hit the ground with excessive speed and bounced. On the second attempt, the aircraft was unstable in both height and speed. On short final, the nose pitched down, and the aircraft struck the ground a few meters before the runway threshold, sliding onto the runway.
The investigation
The investigation focused on the mechanical failure of the control linkage and the electrical path of the lightning. Investigators found that the lightning's energy exceeded the aircraft's design specifications. Crucially, the probe revealed that up to 30% of the strands in the essential grounding cables in the tail may have been defective or corroded prior to the strike, significantly reducing their ability to conduct high-current surges.
Additionally, the investigation examined the crew's use of onboard equipment. It was determined that the aircraft's weather radar was set to a mode that failed to indicate the approaching precipitation cells. The investigation also looked into the air traffic control service's ability to provide weather updates, noting that ground-based radar information was not integrated into the controllers' displays at the time.