What a Difference a Day Makes: How a brush with death made me appreciate life

Author and public relations expert, Terry Prone, describes a frightening experience on a US-Dublin flight, and talks about her surprising response to the incident — and how it proved a life-changer when dealing with nerve-racking encounters after that

Terry Prone: "I was surprised by how un-frightened I was. It wasn’t that I was brave, I just wasn’t frightened. And given that I’d spent my whole life being frightened, this was a life-changer."

It must be 20 years ago. I was heading home from visiting a client in the US, asleep in my reclined seat, when the lights came on and the pilot woke us up — there was smoke in the cockpit and the crew couldn’t establish its source.

Due to fly into Dublin, we were roughly an hour from Ireland — the pilot was going to try to make Shannon. That word ‘try’... like a threat.