Lightning Height Record?
I apologise for the length of this thread, but it is an honest, first-hand account of attaining nearly 88000ft! While on 74 Sqn at Tengah 1968-71 I had an urge to try to find the maximum altitude a Mark 6 Lightning could reach in the tropical air just north of the Equator. At these latitudes, the Tropopause is at its highest, regularly around 55,000ft and this would give the F6, with its Rolls-Royce Avon 302s, their best chance.
Eventually everything fell into place. A Victor tanker returning to Singapore from Hong Kong was offering 17,000lb fuel to giveaway as it entered Malaysian airspace on the northeast coast, which was coincidentally the area in which we were permitted to fly supersonic. I was allocated the trip and flew up to the Malaysia-Thailand border to rendezvous with the tanker before ‘filling to full’. I was now some 300 miles north of base with a clear line down the east coast of Malaysia and no restrictions.
I climbed to 50,000ft, which was the subsonic service ceiling of the Lightning and then accelerated to Mach 2 before flying a zoom climb at the best climb angle (as we understood it to be) of 16 degrees. Before I lost all performance I levelled off at 65,000ft and accelerated once more, amazed at the speed at which this occurred and this time let the aircraft have its head to 2.2M before easing the nose up to reach 70,000ft with no loss of speed and once again pulled back the stick to set 16 degrees of climb. Up we went, though as the altitude – and speed – reduced, the lack of downwash over the tail plane meant that the stick came further and further aft to hold the climb attitude. Eventually, the nose slowly dropped and I levelled off 200ft short of 88,000ft. From this vantage point I could see Singapore as a very small island ahead (and well below) and could convince myself that I could see Vietnam over my left shoulder, Borneo to my left and the coastline of Sumatra beyond the western Malaysian coast. Above me the sky was pitch black and the curvature of the earth clearly visible. Nowadays we are very familiar with how the earth looks from way above, but then it was not at all a common sight and I relished the opportunity to see it for myself. Although the stick was firmly on the backstops, the ailerons were still very responsive and until I touched the throttles, the reheats had remained lit. However, rolling the aircraft over and looking vertically downward I suddenly had the feeling that I was balanced on the ferrule of an extremely long umbrella and I suddenly realised that I did not belong up here. Setting idle/idle gave me my only fearful moment as the warning bells went off in my headset for a major warning on the Central Warning Panel; the CPR warning was illuminated, telling me that the pressurisation was outside the aircraft’s limits. At 50,000ft the cabin altitude was maintained at 27,000 – the easy way to remember what it should read was ‘half the height plus 2’, so at 80,000 I should have been at 42,000 in the cockpit. The lack of air form the engine bleed had allowed the cockpit altitude to rise above this and the warning was the result. I was wearing my pressure jerkin and, of course, my anti-g suit, but the pressurised Taylor helmet initially issued to the Lightning Force had been taken out of service. There was some oxygen overpressure fed to my mask though I do not remember it being very much, so once I realised that the reason for the CPR warning was not the major problem I had at first thought, I went back to enjoying the view and started an extremely long glide back to Tengah. A final bit of fun was making my RT call to Singapore Radar (a unit manned by RAF personnel) for recovery to Tengah: to their question asking my height I responded that I was above 45,000 or Flight Level 450. In those days almost all controlled airspace stopped at this altitude and you did not have to give away your actual altitude. I was, however, approaching the airways that radiated from Singapore and they became persistent, so it was nice to hear their reaction to my admission that I was “Passing Flight Level 720!”
Although this sortie was a marvellous example of the Lightning’s performance, though despite my pressure jerkin and G-suit, I was hardly well equipped for safe flight at such heights. Nevertheless, I can lay claim to the world altitude record for the Lightning of 87,800ft!