IN A PLANE HIT BY LIGHTNING!

Hearing all the talk about Air France flight 447 – and the initial conjecture that it may have been hit by lightning – brings back a scary moment for me. Because I was once in a plane that was hit by lightning.

In the early-spring of 1997, I was Director of Marketing for a public company involved in the resort business. I was on my way from Fort Lauderdale to visit a couple of our resorts in Tennessee, going to Knoxville via Atlanta. I had three of my staff with me.

The first leg of the trip, to Atlanta, was uneventful.

As we taxied on the Atlanta runway, getting ready for takeoff, I slipped on my headphones and popped in a cassette of the Rascals, one of my favorite groups from the sixties. We took off into sunny blue skies, and I leaned back and closed my eyes to listen.

About fifteen minutes later, I happened to open my eyes for a second…and I saw that we were heading straight into an ominous-looking wall of black clouds. I wasn’t exactly thrilled; but I’ve traveled around much of the world, so I put my head back again, closed my eyes, and relaxed. I turned the Rascals up very loud…as I still do when I listen to them.

The ride became very bumpy, and the plane seemed to lose and then gain altitude every few seconds.

Keep in mind that my eyes were closed. And I was really blasting the Rascals, one of the hard-hitting power bands of my early years.

Suddenly, despite the fact that my eyes were closed, I saw a tremendous flash of orange light in my eyes. A split-second later – despite the fact that the Rascals were blasting in my ears - I heard a piercing, sharp crash that shook me…as if a thunderclap had landed right next to me. The plane dropped violently, and my head snapped back against the seat.

I took off my headphones and asked one of my staff sitting next to me what had happened.

“We were hit by lightning,” Lee Anne said. “Right outside our window, on the wing.”

There seemed to be stunned silence throughout the plane. At first, no one spoke; I think they were all too shocked to speak. Then, people began asking each other what happened. Babies started crying. So did a couple of older people. The faces of my three staffers were white.

A few minutes passed. We saw no attendants, and no one spoke to us. A few people began praying out loud. Others clasped their hands together as if in prayer.

Finally, after a few more minutes, the captain came on over the intercom.

“For those of you who are wondering,” he said, “yes, we were hit by lightning. But our controls were not affected. And we do expect to land in Knoxville in about twenty minutes.”

Suffice it to say, for the people on the plane, the twenty minutes seemed like forever. Some people never stopped praying the whole time. And when we finally did land in Knoxville, everyone broke out into spontaneous – but not joyful - applause. As I watched the people line up in the aisle to exit the aircraft, it was like looking into the faces of ghosts…very pale ghosts.

And when they opened the door, I never saw so many people in such a hurry to get off an airplane.

For a week or two afterward, the four of us were sort of celebrities around the company. But, truth be told, I’d really rather find some other way to achieve celebrity status.