Lightning struck John Ray when he was 11.
September 1962. A late-season storm rolled into McCammon, Idaho, during baseball at lunchtime. The shock blew his eardrums and knocked him out, almost killed him. He was in the hospital for eight days.
With a miracle comes attention, and Ray’s 15 minutes were right on schedule. He made the front page of the Idaho State Journal: “Boy of 9 years struck by lightning,” the headline read.
Wrong age, but it didn’t matter. In a town of 500, most knew him anyway, and everyone came by, many he knew and some he didn’t.
“I became kind of a celebrity,” Ray said, “and they go, ‘John, who do you want to be when you grow up? John, what do you want?’ I had no idea.”
On his second or third day in the hospital, while testing his vision one of the doctors asked him, you ever think about being a pilot? Ray had never even been in an airplane.
On the fourth day someone brought him a Reader’s Digest. In it he saw an ad from United Airlines.
“It said, ‘We’ll pay you a million dollars to be a pilot,’” he said. “From that point on, whenever anybody came in, I just told them … I’m going to be a pilot.”
Now, some 60 years later, Ray has won The Wright Brothers Master Pilot Award, an honor the Federal Aviation Administration bestows pilots with 50 years of accident-free flying.
His military call sign? “Lucky.”
His wife put him in for the award, and in February they held a party to celebrate his career that spanned Naval Flight School, the Marine Corps, commercial and private aviation. Ray has flown fighter jets and corporate jets, 727s and DC10s, celebrities and his own family.
So how do you sum up 50 years? Five decades of nothing going wrong? Are there stories in a career with no accidents?
Well, there is one, Ray said.
It’s about him flying his wife and young daughter to Alaska. This was after he had left active duty with the Marine Corps and joined the reserves. He’d bought a little plane and started flying people around Alaska, working for a construction company until he could find a job with an airline. His boss at the time decided to buy himself a little plane, a Cessna 172 Skyhawk. The plan was they’d go to Arizona, get the plane and fly it back, him and his boss and his family.
“We stopped in Seattle, spent the night,” Ray said, “and then the next day … we were going to fly all the way up to Skagway, Alaska. We had beautiful weather. It was in February, and it gets dark up there about 3.”
Things started to get bad around Juneau.
“I got caught in a snowstorm the last 90 miles that just about cost me my life,” Ray said.
Skagway is an inlet, and Juneau sits on the Gastineau Channel, surrounded by mountains up to about 8,000 feet. There was no air traffic control, the plane didn’t have radar and it was 1982 — no GPS. Flying in the dark, Ray followed the ship channel markers through the inlet, way of the Lynn Canal, when the snowstorm hit.
“Really couldn’t get out of it. It came in behind us,” he said. “The weather changes so fast up there, and the airplane didn’t have the performance to get up very high. I wasn’t sure exactly how to get back out, which way would put me over the ocean, away from the mountains.”
Ray decided to wait out the storm. He took the plane into a tight circle, knowing that the wind would be shifting him to one side or the other. He kept calm. His boss panicked.
“He just kept going, ‘I bought the farm, I bought the farm,’” Ray said. “We haven’t bought the farm till the fat lady sings, you know? But we got to where we were so desperate that I actually considered ditching in the water.”
But they couldn’t see the water — or anything. Ray was flying on instruments, relying on his naval training and Marine Corps experience. He climbed as high as he could, cleared the mountains and caught a radar signal.
“They said, ‘What do you want to do?’ And I said, ‘Just put me right over the top of Juneau airport … turn your lights up.’”
Well, good luck, they told him. He pointed the little plane down and death spiraled. He finally saw lights at about 1,000 feet, hazy but there. He sparrowed down, 65 miles an hour, close to stalling speed, and landed the plane.
“It was just luck,” he said. “It was luck that I got in.”
The whole thing was about two hours. And yeah, there are other stories, other emergencies, Ray said. Close calls with jets inches from colliding, engine failures requiring a turnaround, moments where chance could have prevailed, but nothing so harrowing or as drawn out as that time over Juneau.
And that’s probably for the best. One major close call, one lightning strike, that’s enough. The rest of his career past his military service is impressive, too: Ray started flying commercial for American Airlines in 1984 and made captain just five years later, a role he held for 27 of his 32 years there. That usually takes about 15 years, but American was expanding rapidly during the ’80s, he said. Getting the job was the hardest part.
In 2016 he started flying corporate and contract: two years as first officer for STA Jets, four years as pilot in command for Jet Edge and the last four as a contract pilot in command on a Falcon 50 and 900, mostly for Park City Aviators. That kind of flying is its own fun, he said, and you get to meet some interesting people. Ever modest, Ray won’t divulge, except the one he got a picture with — Shaq. A very friendly guy, he said.
“Looks like he ate about three of me,” Ray laughed. “Big guy.”
His last flight will probably happen soon, he said. He’s not sure when or what it will be. But even then, he’ll find an adventure. Ski, travel Europe, ride side by sides out in the desert, race motorcycles in Sturgis, South Dakota — whatever sounds fun. A man who can fly a plane can set his mind to do anything he wants with his life.
“It’s been a long road for me. I’ve enjoyed it,” Ray said. “Looking back on it, it’s the best job I could have ever had … It’s a dream I had as a little boy.”