The following is a paper by H. Aspden published in The Journal of Meteorology UK, v. 6, pp. 258-260 (1981).
Commentary: This short paper discusses the phenomenon of ball lightning within aircraft and the reported sightings of luminous balls leaving the body of the aircraft and hovering on the wings. The author stresses that such evidence shows that the balls are not quasi-stable objects comprising nothing other than ionized air. There has to be an underlying energy medium in spin that develops an electric or magnetic attraction holding the bounding sphere to the wing.