Aircraft are designed to be able to withstand lightning strikes, so for anyone panicking this is just a precaution.

By the way, "lightning" is misspelled in the tags.

@Buran: Very true about the first point, but travelling in a plane when it is struck by lightning can be scarier than any amount of turbulence.

Lightning.

Lightening is the act of making something lighter.

Shhh! The Meghann unit gets angries when you point out editing mistakes.

OT: hmmmm--- how does one go about ensuring that each of the flights one is on gets lightning struck?

That plane must have been equipped with one of Dr. Emmet Brown's Flux Capacitors.

I vote hooray! They could have landed at some podunk airport in the middle of nowhere that didn't have stairs to fit the plane, and made the passengers stay in the plane for hours on end.

I guess you really do have a better chance of getting hit by lightning than arriving early on a jet blue flight.

@Kornkob: Wear a "I hate Thor" t-shirt whenever flying. It should work as long as you can get past security with it.

Wait a minute. This is Consumerist. Shouldn't that headline read "Several Flights Into JFK Flights Arrive Twenty Minutes Late Thanks to JetBlue FradyCats"

;)

@nffcnnr: Only twenty minutes early? They're lucky they didn't land in 1955!

1.21 jiggawatts! lol!

They might have arrived 20 minutes early, but I wonder if they had to wait awhile to actually get off the plane itself. And if that were to personally happen to me on a flight, I'd still be a bit nervous. The fact that the plane was struck by lightning against all odds would surprise me, and that I'm so high up in the air... it's just one of those situations I'd prefer not to be in, safety precautions in place or not.

@SteveJeltzFan: It can be, although I remember the time I was on a flight that managed both... zot.

but did they apologize? this is Jet Blue, after all.

The first thing I thought of when I read the title was "Holy crap, did they must have teleported!"

I feel really dumb now.

I feel even dumber because I just said "DID THEY must have teleported"

LOL Moosehawk!

Did we learn anything from the Air Canada 1983 crash landing and the Swissair MD-11 crash in the 1990s? You don't mess around with cabin/electrical fires -- they can spread at enormous rates. Those pilots should have landed the plane immediately when they suspected a fire, not mosey on to their destination. I would be furious if I had been on that flight.

@timmus: How do you know they didn't declare an emergency? Quite likely they did. "Routed ahead of other traffic" would fit with that -- an aircraft that has declared gets priority, and the pilot, not the tower, dictates where and when it will land. They were put through the holding pattern rather than having to wait in it.

So you're furious now at the pilot who acted to get the flight on the ground as soon as possible?

Wow. People really DO complain when someone does something FOR them.

Since they arrived early, do the passengers have to give more money to Jetblue as part of an airlines bill of rights???

@timmus: It was a pretty short flight as flights go, it might have actually been closes to proceed to JFK if they were more than 1/2 way done with the flight when they were hit. I don't know of any other airports capable of taking a A320 between Rochester and JFK (maybe LGA, but again, depends where they were hit.)

The only ones I can think of are LGA, JFK and EWR definitely, and POSSIBLY Westchester County. If it happened right after takeoff, they always have Toronto. But either way, if they landed at LGA or EWR or Westchester, it would have pissed the passengers off anyway, so they might as well fly the extra 6 minutes to their destination.