I'm not qualified in any sense to comment on the Lightning's capabilities, suffice it to say that my screensaver is a lovely picture of a Lightning in company with with a Victor K1 over the Alps*, two of the most visually appealing aircraft ever built IMOH.

Lightnings were my "stock in trade" during my six years on tankers, and their renowned thirst meant frequent visits to the hose for replenishment, thus reducing the time till we got back down and off to the bar! A highlight of my time at Marham was when I got a ride in a T4 when the Lightning OCU was lodging with us while Coltishall's runway was renewed My experience was similar to WASALOADIE'S, although I was somewhat taken aback when the pilot slipped on a pair of specs as part of his pre takeoff checks. Steely-eyed fighter pilots indeed!

*Sent to me by Lightning Mate, who I haven't seen for a while - hello LM if you are still around!

Didnt the Saab Draken achieve roughly similar performance (difficult to compare different variants at different stages of development) using just one Avon?

I am surprised by the criticism of the Firestreak & Red Top. My memory from my training is that the seaker head on these was far more sophisticated and sensitive than the equivalent Sidewinder and it wasnt until later marks of the AIM-9 that the seaker performance caught up?

Andyy, IIRC the Draken was powered by a Volvo Flygmotor engine, built under licence and identical to the Avon in the Lightning.

I recall Gunston's comments on the first flights of the P.1 and the first Saab 35, to the effect that the Saab pilot may have been more relaxed, since he had 70 per cent as much internal fuel and half the engines...

For those interested in the safety record of this brilliant aeroplane, have a look at 'Ligbtning Eject' by Peter Caygill.

It includes the story of bow Flt Lt Eric Steenson failed to get airborne in XR 711 and slid along Wattisham' s runway on his belly tank. Great bloke who signed me off as a 737 Skipper. Sadly passed away last month.

I can still feel my internal organs vibrating to the sound of a Lightning formation team at Farnborough '64.

OC Tremblers' Jet: Last Day
 

Hello newt. Still haven't found your old TVR I'm afraid (or my first one for that matter).

P.S. Sorry for thread drift

Thought I had found it a couple of months ago but it was the same year but two numbers different!:{

More years ago than I care to recount, I saw a photo of a Lightning that had taken station on the port side of a Russian 'Bear', somewhere over the North Sea. In the Bear's bomb aimer's 'bubble' was a crew member who was waving and smiling. Rumour had it that the Lightning pilot was displaying an open Playboy centrefold to said Russian crewman. Does anyone have a copy of this?

Willi B - I have sent you a PM.

From my experience, opening up a centrefold of Playboy within the confines of a Lightning's cockpit would have been a feat of extraordinary origami. I assume that it is a copy of the photo that you want - not the Playboy centrefold

Willib, I thought it was the other way around with the Bear showing the centre fold.

nipva


Please see your PMs

PN, I think your recollection is correct.
I remember seeing this pic in B&W (was it in "Air Clues" ?) with the rear crewman holding up the centrefold in the Bear aft (port?) bubble. Yes, the other way around, it would have been origami gymnastics by the WIWOL.

As Shakespeare's Henry V said, 'Old men forget'.


Hopefully I'll be reminded shortly.

Well, Newt, considering that within 6 months of leaving Germany I was checked out on the F4 with Pulse Doppler radar, 4 genuine head-on missiles that did not need a target going fast enough for skin heat, 4 reliable IR missiles with better performance than Firestreak or Red Flop, a gun and enough fuel to loiter for more than a couple of hours - and it performed adequately for not only the AD role but Recce and GA too. Add nuclear strike to it's repertoire as well!
Yes, the Lightning was a superb sports machine and very impressive but not as good as people who did not operate a real war machine think.

I rest my case.

" soddim" it took you so long to answer I thought you may have departed the fix! Yes the F4 had all those things! You forgot to mention it also had a navigator to operate the weapons system. Not required in a Lighning! And we still used to score plenty of kills against them!:ugh:

Swanning around at 15K looking low with PD for the bad guys - because that's what it was best at. However....

Post-USSR inspections of the Backfire/Blackjack revealed no low-level kit. Why not? It seems they tactics were to have been to ingress supersonic at about 50K and loft AS-4/AS-6 under heavy ECM, with the Mx penetrating at 80K+.

So, a "real war machine" in Vietnam, but in Cold War WWIII?

Tomb drivers had a sense of superiority..... Lightning drivers had fun...... :p

I am not one to post generally, but read with interest this and other threads.

My thoughts after tours on Lightning, F15, F4 and Tornado F3.

F15 overall best of the lot for weapons and handling, Lightning best for handling and raw performance, F4 good for weapons. F3 best for information.

However; F4 worst for handling, only behaved like a real fighter when almost empty of fuel.

Lightning best 'feel'. Shame about the lack of fuel and weapons, but hey you can't, have everything. We certainly had fun!

Newt, every pilot has his memories of 'lots of kills' but those are personal victories and not often representative of true comparison or evaluation.
For example, within a few months of leaving the Lightning I went to Binbrook to pick up a diverted F4 with an exchange Marine Corps RIO with two Vietnam tours to his credit. He embarrassed me in the crewroom by shouting 'Any of you Lightning pilots want a fight?' We took off as a 1 v 2 and claimed kills on both repeatedly until they ran out of fuel. However, the cloudbase was around 400ft with tops over 30k and we were never VMC for any of the engagements so what would one expect?
I enjoyed the pleasure of flying the Lightning and the operational satisfaction of the F4.

@ MACH2NUMBER ... some might defer to your background, but I wouldn't hold your breath on this Thread!! :cool:

Interesting insight, though :ok:

nipva

Thanks for the photographs.


PN and BBadanov,


Your respective recollections of the photograph in question are correct.

Lightning experience
 

As one whose direct involvement with the Lighting was on the technical side, two and a half years of fixing fuel leaks and carrying out the fire mod programme on 56 Sqdns F6 aircraft at Akrotiri, whatever its capabilities as a weapon of war, as an aircraft to display the power of two Avons in and out of reheat surrounded by the minimum amount of aluminium possible there was and still is nothing to beat it! The massive effect that the Vulcan has had over the past few years has as much to do with the absolutely mind blowing noise of four Olympus working hard for a living as for its place in history as the last of its breed.
I was at Biggin for the last RAF organised battle of Britain display back in about 1976 on detachment from Lyneham, and the display that had the most effect on the public was the Lightning display where its arrival was via the valley at the Saltbox café end of the airfield followed by a pullup in the centre of the display line to the vertical with the engagement of double reheat, you could actually see the crowd jump as the noise hit them followed by max rate turns yet again with reheat engaged, just a stunning noise and display, nobody would allow it today but by God it was good!
Having seen the amount of work that had to be put into the aircraft to keep it flying and the antiquity of the systems used in it, we had to get a pipe bender from BAC come out to Akrotiri to bend a main fuel pipe for us as all the aircraft and the pipes were individually matched as they were all different, it was never going to be a major success as to the numbers built, the technology moved on so quickly but it was a lovely plane to watch displaying with such an impressive presence.

Great comment from the pilot at Thunder City when interviewed by John Nicol some time ago:

"They only put wings on it to keep the nav lights separated" (or words to that effect).

love it.

It was an aircraft designed for a single purpose and later pressed into coping with something completely different. It was "that good" at what it was designed to do. It was always struggling against its heritage to do the job demanded of it as things changed.

BUT, the Lightning PILOTS were that good and they are why the aircraft continued to be respected. And the FC guys, AAR, engineers et al.

Mach Two,

The Lightning had two overwhelming attributes; it had no navigator and it was BRITISH!:)

...a bit like the Austin Allegro then?

Courtney, you is a very norty boy.:ok:

CG

:E. :E

Depends on your criteria
 

As an exuberant joy to its pilots - yes it was
For outright performance - yes it was
As a display crowd pleaser - yes it was
As a surprise to complacent U2 pilots - yes it was
As a weapons platform - probably not but it compared favourably with its pulse radar equipped contemporaries (F106/Mig21/MirageIII/Draken/F104) but, as we all know, its Achilles heel was fuel but this shortage did have the unintended benefit of providing an additional adrenalin charge for its pilots.
The fact that so many people are jealous of those that flew it speaks volumes and has to be a case for saying that it must have been 'that good'!

I went on cadet camp to Binbrook twice; '83 & '87, what a difference between the two years!
In '83 it was deafeningly busy with full flightlines for 5, 11 and LTF and constant activity. I spent a day with the firemen, who had to dash out for brake fires at least 3 times and then a day in 5 sqn maint where I got to help remove the top engine by sitting astride it as they lifted it winding the little wheel to move the CofG/pivot point for the crane attachment

On my second visit it was depressingly quiet, only 2 or 3 ships from each squadron were wheeled out each day and rarely anything from LTF. I spent the week as duty cadet strapping other cadets into the Chipmunks (and had my PPL by then so got some fun flying too) but at least I got to spend some quality time sat by the runway watching them.

Our camp was the week leading up to the last of the Lightning show, I remember standing near 11 sqn hangar watching the arrivals on the Friday afternoon and a Tornado F3 arrived just as one of the Lighnings was returning from a sortie....they did a slow pass side by side, then came back past a little faster....then it all went quiet....the Tonka appeared going quite quickly and pulled up hard...just as the Lighning came screaming past, stood on its tail and shot straight up, the whole station erupted into cheers!

My Swinderby passing out parade in May '88 was the last one to have a Lighning flypast, my Dad spent the whole thing with his back to the parade watching the Lighnings holding.

My last contact with Lightnings was whilst on Loadie ground school at Finningley, my Gatehouse housemate was a Binbrooke Brat and invited a couple of Binbrooke daughters over for the airshow weekend and asked me to help him 'take care of them' :E

Yes of course PN, I had forgotten there was an F2 at all!

PN,
Didn't 29 Sqn re-equip with the F3 in May 1987?

Oh yes we did...

I went from Binbrook to Coningsby in November that year - out of one cockpit into the other in just about a month. And, boy, what a disappointment that was!

I don't recall it being as quiet at BK in 1987 as Wessex Boy, other than we were ensuring that we had enough jets for Jon Spon's opposition Balbo before heading off on our last Firestreak MPC.

That last open-day 9-ship was quite something given the weather on the day - one of those better to remember in hindsight than to have been on at the time. A few of us returned to smoking for the day after that...

I watched most of the show on the CCTV screen on the VC10 whilst supping beers!
stayed mostly dry, it was a horrendous day!

I was there too, it was horridly wet - I think it was IB who did a flypast at about .98M, and I have a photo somewhere of the shock waves

I went there in Summer 1959, and had 2 trips in Anson T20 WJ514 of the Stn Flt, flown by the distinguished [to us] persona of Fg Off Jeremy Ffoliant-Foster and his enormous handlebar moustache.

What a marvellous recruitment image that was for an impressionable 14-yo. :ok:

Later experiences as a detached ATCO (late 60's, in GCA), and as a visiting 11 Gp Staff Officer, had other dimensions of course.

But that stream take-off, tight right hand turns and reheat pull ups back over the crowd in that monsoon and eerie lighting was a sight to behold and something I'll remember for ever :ok::D

So, an amazing aeroplane, loads of thrust and no navigator, therefore a pilot's aircraft. Just what the tax payer wanted to pay for to defend the UK.

Again I say, a truly brilliant piece of design for its purpose. If you measure how "good" an aircraft is by how much its pilots enjoyed flying it, then yes, it was a great success. And at its specialised role it was supreme.

It continued to be a valuable asset to UKAD throughout its life. So, yes it was that great.

Cold War, night, IMC, long range (beyond the range of Soviet cruise missiles), sustained CAP, tanker support lost, comms jammed (no fighter control), base wx Red, nearest div 50+ miles away.

Mach Two, I like your UK summary below,

'Cold War, night, IMC, long range (beyond the range of Soviet cruise missiles), sustained CAP, tanker support lost, comms jammed (no fighter control), base wx Red, nearest div 50+ miles away'.

Yes, we did all that, but what about Germany? Low Caps, fighter sweeps over Wittmund/Jever, dial a Lightning etc etc.

Lightnings ruled for a brief, but very enjoyable time over Europe.

BFTS, Linton '83. As studes we had to spend an 'hour in the tower' each month to familiarise ourselves with ATC. I duly 'plugged in' to an attractive WRAF on radar to hear what was going on.
She was passed a departing Lightning from tower.
Attractive WRAF "Morning Punchy One (I made up the cs coz I can't remember the real one any more) call passing FL 70"
Lightning "Passing FL 220, do you want me to descend?"
"Negative, state direction of departure"
"Straight up."
"Request destination."
"Binbrook."
"Would you like clearance through Blue 4?" (old airways nomenclature for younger readers)
"Negative, going over the top."
"Roger, request ETA for Binbrook."
"5 minutes. QSY Binbrook Approach."

And that was that. I think we both learned quite a lot about the performance of the Lightning in that 15 seconds!