The Reason For Those Balls on Power Lines is Shocking

Every time I've gotten off the thruway I wondered what the balls on the power lines were for. I was shocked when I found out their real reason.

Alright, so I have asked a few people and only a few actually knew what they were. Imagine having a light switch somewhere in your home's kitchen that doesn't work, wouldn't you want to know what it did? Maybe I'm just very inquisitive. Now bad puns aside about being shocked, I was actually very stunned when I learned they were meant for planes when landing. I always assumed they had to be for weather, some kind of doppler tracking storm system thing that is way above my brain's capacity. But nope, totally not that.

But literally, all they are meant to do is tell the pilot of a plane that there are power lines right there, so I would imagine it's near a place where a plane or helicopter would be landing. According to sciencing.com, they are typically found in areas away from cities where there isn't much around. Obviously, if a plane is flying over a city it would have buildings as a guide telling them they are too low. Where it's wide-open they could hit power lines, so the balls help.

If my memory serves me right, the ones around exit 31 of the thruway are red. That is purely determined by the landscape. Nothing around there is red really so they stick out like a sore thumb. Find out even more info about the power line balls here.