"It was a dark and stormy night."

Well, it was night and overcast clouds made it dark. There was some rain around and widely scattered thunderstorms, but it was a good night for flying. Our airplane was equipped with weather radar and a strike finder taking the unknown out of the situation. If you don't remember the days before the miracle of satellite weather, a strike finder detected lightning and could do that all around the aircraft, unlike radar which could only see ahead.

My colleague and I had been to a meeting at an airport in western Minnesota. Our business had been successfully concluded, and it was time to head home for a well-earned libation, so we climbed in the airplane and headed east. After about 20 minutes we flew into an area of steady light rain. It was all green on the radar and the strike finder showed only an occasional dot. God was about to demonstrate why aviators shouldn't get complacent.

A faint blueish glow formed at the bottom of the windscreen and on the leading edge of the wings. The wind screen was soon covered with a glowing web. It was St. Elmo's Fire, a meteorological phenomenon and not an old movie. According to a legend from the days of sailing ships, the appearance of St. Elmo's Fire in the rigging means there won't be a lightening strike. That was comforting. Scientifically it's simply an electrical discharge and poses no threat to humans or machines. In less than 10 minutes we flew out of the rain and the glow was replaced by the lights of farms and occasionally a small town.

St. Elmo is the patron of sailors and was also known as Erasmus. Elmo was a bishop of the early Christian church and lived in Formia, Italy during the third century. One day Elmo was preaching outdoors when a lightning bolt struck the ground next to him. He kept on preaching giving rise to the theory that the appearance of St. Elmo's fire will deter lightning strikes. Elmo was associated with St. Maurice who was a historical contemporary. Maurice was a Roman soldier and commander of the legion in Thebes, but doesn't seem to have actually met Elmo (or Erasmus).

William Bligh and Ferdinand Magellan are two well known seafarers who recorded the occurrence of St. Elmo's Fire during their epic voyages. Pierre Testu-Brissy was a very brave Frenchman who flew a balloon into some clouds in 1786 to observe electrical discharges thus being the first aviator to report St. Elmo's fire

Nikola Tesla invented a lot of stuff, but not the electric automobile. He did create St. Elmo's Fire on the wings of butterflies in 1899 when testing an electrical coil at his laboratory in Colorado, which might have been the second flying observation of the phenomenon. Later it ominously appeared on the B-29 delivering a nuclear bomb to Nagasaki in 1945.

Flying home from an airport board meeting doesn't qualify as epic, but this trip was certainly memorable.