Voltage drop along a lightning channel during strikes to aircraft

An engineering expression, based on data in the scientific literature, has been established for the voltage drop along a lightning channel, pertinent to lightning strikes to aircraft. During the strike, two regimes of the lightning current exist: current impulse phase and continuing current phase. For the impulse current phase, the inductance of the lightning channel dominates and the upper limit of the voltage drop is ΔV = 106 V/m. For the continuing current phase, the dynamic resistance of channel governs the voltage drop, which has an upper limit of ΔV = 104·η·I−0,18 V/m where I is the lightning current and η is the atmospheric correction factor.