1. The Day My Plane Was Struck By Lightning
The old caravan parked by the roadside beneath the tall eucalypts in the Australian bush, my home (such as it was) until only yesterday, seemed a lifetime away. (How I came to be living in a leaky old caravan is explained in Chapter 2.) As we gently cruised at around 30,000 feet, I became alarmed as I watched the endless expanse of white fluffy cloud below lightly brushed by the late afternoon sun give way to a dark menacing tentacle of trouble reaching high above us in the distance. The plane dramatically changed course and began losing altitude. Just then a voice from the cockpit broke the silence: “We’ve just been informed by the control tower at Chicago Airport that a severe electrical storm has knocked out one of the two runways there. We are one of about a hundred aircraft in the air maintaining a holding position waiting for a clearance to land. There are currently four holding positions over nearby alternative airfields in case landings are not possible a...