When I was in grad school doing lightning research, one of the experiments one summer involved triggering lightning as a research airplane was flying overhead. It was pretty exciting to see the plane hit by lightning (I was on the ground, not on the plane) and later to see the damage on the where the lightning strike had attached to. Timing was critical as we needed to trigger lightning at the exact time to increase the odds of the plane being hit. It went on for a whole month, and we managed to get several strikes. It's the only time where I've known of a pilot to purposely fly the plane in order to maximize the chances of getting struck by lightning.