[bananabreakfast]

This is essentially impossible.

Yes a single lightning strike contains roughly a similar order of magnitude of energy as an entire charged flight battery would but it is delivered in microseconds. That comes out to hundreds of terawatts of power while in comparison the new Tesla supercharger charges at an incredibly high rate of hundreds of kW. That's 1 Million times lower than lightning! There is no substance on earth that can absorb and store energy at that power rating.

On top of all of that, even if you could get it to work it would be such an unreliable source of energy that it would never make any economical sense to deploy on plane if you could just capture it on the ground and charge the plane from there.

[GrantZvolsky]

Is it really impossible?

About a decade ago an astrophysicist friend of mine told me that you can store lightning energy into some kind of a supraconductor, the problem being that we don't know how to take the energy out.

I believe he described something similar to [Superconducting magnetic energy storage](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_ene...)