Was the Lightning really THAT good ?
Now before you tar and feather me, just come back out of reheat for a moment and hear me out.
A little background is necessary to provide some frame of reference for the question.
I grew up worshiping the Lightning as a little kid in England, and in the years that followed the legend and folklore that built up around the aircraft has become even more entrenched with the passing of time. My book cabinet contains numerous tomes on the Lightning including Roland Beaumont's definitive work detailing his years testing the aircraft and then comparing it to the F-104, Mirage III, and the Delta Dart - all of which he judged to be significantly inferior. The photo that holds pride of place in my study here in this strange and exotic Arizonan desert hideaway that I now call home is an F.6 in flight at sunset, mounted in an Amazonian hardwood frame with museum quality non-reflective glass - that one photo cost me a small fortune partly because I had to track down the UK based photographer and purchase a unique single print directly from him after seeing the image published in a magazine article on the Lightning. It sits between a mounted and fully functional BSA Lee Enfield NoI MkIII dated 1917 and my personally signed photo of Julie Adams - but neither catch my eye like the photo of the Lightning, and Julie Adams is smiling at me while posing in a bathing suit.....
In short I have amassed as much information on the Frightening and its weapons systems as any reasonable person possibly could, even spending hours analyzing Airpass radar plots to see if I could figure out the position of the contact (bloody difficult at the best of times).
But I never flew it, and a trip to Thunder City would be pointless now, so I never will.
The more I researched, the more I tried to form some type of conclusion about the true capabilities of the Lightning in combat, that final decisive arbiter in any warplane's career, and of course unless you count the runaway Harrier shootdown the Lightning never really went into action in a real shooting war, so ultimately any such discussion can never be truly decisive.
So these are my personal observations and conclusions, I've structured them in a "good first / bad last" sort of way.
Handling - the aircraft has/had peerless handling, it was a true pilot's aircraft with astonishing levels of performance even by today's standards. A maximum speed well in excess of Mach 2, a zoom climb ceiling of anywhere up to 100,000 feet or more, all with perfect control feedback and no unpleasant surprises at anything other than very low speeds or excessive AoA.
Engines - powerful and reliable with just the one known flaw of some tail end fires that had unfortunate consequences due to the location of control runs.
Avionics - for its day the Ferranti Airpass was a perfectly acceptable fighter radar coupled with a surprisingly innovative and advanced FCS, it quickly became obsolete however and was one of the many areas that adequate RAF funding could have improved immensely.
Design - showed a tendency to an experimental design as opposed to an operational design. The staggered engines reduced drag but servicing of the upper engine usually required removal of the lower engine. Fuel, or rather the shortage thereof - which to be fair was the bane of most of the early jets but something that was so much more pronounced in the Lightning due to the inability to carry underwing tanks and the prodigious consumption of the Avons, 10 minutes from full to dry tanks if the pilot stayed in full reheat.
Weapons - the Firestreak and Redtop were large weapons with equally large warheads designed to bring down the largest bomber with a single hit. Redtop could perform head on attacks but really needed Mach sized leading edge heating, and that left the pilot needing to manouever into the frontal quadrant of an approaching supersonic aircraft, tricky to say the least. A far more interesting question for me was how those weapons would have fared against fighter type targets, something that they were not designed for. While there was talk of fitting more missiles I'm not aware of a Lightning flying with more than just 2, and in the case of the F.3 no guns to boot. Technically the F.2A could fly with a fit of 6 x 30mm ADEN, if faced with fighters I always imagined this to be the better option. But Redtop an Firestreak will always remain my biggest question marks in the entire Lightning equation - were they reliable, was the warm up time and cooling envelope restrictive, how well did they really cope with off boresight launches, bad weather, a small maneuvering target. Honestly I have never been able to get a clear picture, but I did read one comment from a Lightning pilot who simply said "we never had much faith in either of them".
Reliability - MHFBF and general maintenance hours appear to have been eye wateringly bad, Bill Gunston briefly commented on the subject once and said that the true number was well over 100 maintenance hours per single flight hour, but that as the aircraft was still in service he couldn't comment further as the actual number was classified. By comparison the Mirage III and MiG 21 were renowned by all operators as "push the starter and go" type aircraft. Losses on the type were also very high, I recall reading somewhere that Lightning losses were every bit as bad and even slightly worse than the F-104, but no one ever called referred to the Lightning as the "Widowmaker".
Pilots Opinion's - mixed to say the least. British pilots of course loved it, Beaumont called it the best jet fighter he ever flew in, and he flew them all. American exchange pilots were also highly complimentary, as were the Saudis, but the Kuwaitis hated theirs, possibly because they could never keep them flying. Hard to like an aircraft that won't go.
Sales - ahh a real hot button topic that positively invites the chorus of howls about "Yanks giving away free F-104s" and generally throwing their weight around. Well I'm afraid that's part of the game in all sales based environments, but if your product is good enough in my experience it will still succeed in the market place. As for actual sales the Europeans sniffed at it but opted en masse for Mirage IIIs, then the simpler Vs, and of course the lamentable but somewhat free of charge F-104. The Saudis bought it, but we now know that was because we heavily bribed them, and then there was of course the aforementioned Kuwaitis, who were not fans and offloaded them very quickly.
Simulated Combat - there is no one size fits all here. I know of many pilots who have defeated F-15s and their ilk, but then I also have an actual combat report somewhere in the mess on my desk that details the course of events when 2 F-15As went up against pretty much the entire population of Binbrook. The Eagles flew across the North Sea from their German base and waited for the first group of Lightning's which were all defeated in short order before they then ran out of fuel, the Eagles waited for the second batch to arrive, "shot" all those down and then watched the second wave RTB because of fuel at which point with no adversaries left they also went home (or possibly rejoined at Binbrook - I forget). I do however clearly recall this line from the lead Eagle pilot "they swarmed around us like flies, but at no time did they ever seem to be a real threat". But we are of course talking about aircraft designed 20 years apart, hardly fair as this is an eternity in the earlier days of second and third generation jet fighters. I never did find a Lightning versus Mirage III simcom report but I would dearly love to know of any encounters with our French friends.
So please feel free to express your grievances with any of my conclusions, or correct any factual errors I may have made. All this is not designed to provoke moral outrage, and in fact it shouldn't because I only fly armchairs for a living, but I have studied this aircraft as man and boy on and off for 40 years and if I have learned one thing for certain, it's that there is always so much more to learn about it.
Teach me.