There was another time,when flying from the U.K. to New York,at night, in a Hermes, and we were about 3/4 of the way,or more, there, that we ran into an Electrical storm . After a bit of flashing lights there was a bang, which usually meant that the top antenna(between cockpit and the top of the tail fin ) had been hit. (I`d had it before) even though I had already earthed the antenna. This time, however, it was different in that when I tried out the radio I could hear signals clearly( if the antenna had gone you would hear nothing).

We carried on towards the first checkpoint on the American East coast and the skipper began to remark about the odd headings on the compass that he had to make to reach the checkpoint, using the ADF.(Automatic Direction Finder). We finally approached New York and the controller gave us a runway direction to land on, but it didn`t tie in with our compass reading. Nevertheless, the controller had us on Radar and said our heading was ok and we were clear to land. Our handling agents were told about the odd compass readings we had had and they checked it out by doing a compass swing.

They found that the compass was now 35 degrees out!!. As 1 degree out is 1 mile in 60 out, it could have been quite disastrous if we had been about halfway across the Atlantic when it happened. Apparently it was caused by the antenna being broken at the tail fin end (hence the signals being received ok) and the insulator on the end just banging around on the fuselage which caused the magnetic properties of the plane to change direction, hence the compass aberration!. (A passenger had mentioned to the steward about a banging noise at the rear, but the flight engineer had checked and could find nothing ).