Lightning Boys 2 by Pike Richard;

Author:Pike, Richard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Military / Aviation
ISBN: 1650692
Publisher: Grub Street Publishing
Published: 2013-08-18T16:00:00+00:00

The Lightning was renowned for its ear-splitting and spectacular vertical climb at just about every air show at which the aircraft was demonstrated. I will always remember a fabulous ‘Diamond Nine’ display by 74 Squadron. The high speed, near silent approach with white water vapour shimmering over their wings was a beautiful sight to behold. Then came that overwhelming wall of sound as the Lightnings drew level, stood on their tails and seemed to climb into the heavens forever. The din should have woken the dead for 50 miles around and the emotional impact was palpable. Many moist eyes in the crowd were being wiped after that display.

This performance, though, was more than just a crowd pleaser – it was real. Whilst the Lightning could not maintain its astonishing initial rate of climb of 50,000 feet per minute, the aircraft could easily reach an altitude of 40,000 feet in 2.5 minutes and there are recorded instances of Lightnings, with missiles fitted, climbing to over 85,000 feet. This was the territory of the Lockheed U-2 high altitude reconnaissance aircraft with its 103-feet wingspan and must have caused considerable surprise and alarm to any United States U-2 pilot who found a British colleague grinning at him from alongside.

The Lightning has beaten the McDonnell Douglas F15 Eagle up to 30,000 feet and out-climbed many other later aircraft like the McDonnell Douglas F4 Phantom, the variable-sweep wing Grumman F14 Tomcat, the General Dynamics F16 Freedom Fighter, the Dassault Mirage III, the variable-sweep wing Panavia Tornado and last, but not least, the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21 (NATO code-named ‘Fishbed’). It has been said that the Lightning was the fastest pilot-only aeroplane ever built in that the machine lacked sophisticated on-board computers – the pilot had to do it all. Today’s combat aircraft are designed to be inherently unstable with stability only achieved by two or three computers working in parallel to obey the pilot’s instructions. If the computers fail most of these aircraft will become unflyable. The Lightning was the most manoeuvrable Mach 2 fighter of its generation. One of the trickier aspects about flying it, however, was landing in a crosswind at nearly 200 mph, the skinny tyres always making that a bit of a lottery, particularly on a wet runway.

The Lightning, because of its complexity and the packaging density of its systems, was difficult and highly labour-intensive to maintain. There’s a worst case report of one thousand hours of maintenance required to achieve just one flying hour. Hopefully this was the exception rather than the rule. The Lightning story would not be complete without mentioning the rather grim statistic that crashes and other accidents accounted for more than a third of the aircraft built; for various reasons nearly 120 Lightnings were lost over its service life. The single major cause of loss was fire, both in the air and on the ground, which accounted for 33 aircraft. Undercarriage problems disposed of a further 18 aircraft, six were lost in mid-air collisions, two ran out of fuel and one aircraft somehow or other managed to ingest a display banner.

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