Good approach. The best application I have found to monitor lightning activity is
Lightning & Thunderstorms - World Map
There are several pre made maps you can use but you can also use their Lightning Vector Map and zoom in to just the area you want. It is in real time with hundreds of time stamped lightning detectors around the world. The servers do all the time stamp triangulation calculations and then rapidly display accurate locations on the map in near real time (maybe 1 to 8 second delay). This will show you how far away the activity is and when it is getting too close to fly.