Lightning Endurance ?
 

Unrefuelled, isn't the thread title an oxymoron....hat,.....coat.......

From memory 5 Sqn did Bahrain and back to Binbrook non stop in May 68, and I think that these legs were over 8 hours. Perhaps an ex 74 Sqn pilot could comment on the times to Singapore? Over 2 hours unrefuelled with overwings was possible.

We had a 'special' one at Farnborough with trials equipment taking up about half the belly tank so it had an endurance of about 50min.

I've got several pics in my archive of F.3s and T.5s minus the (already small!) ventral tank in flight and heading for the runway, endurance must've been sub 30 minutes for those flights, surely?

-RP

I always thought it very rude of the Lightning guys who, after we had tanked them nearly all the way from the UK used to bugger off and leave us to plod along at Mach 0.84 while they hurtled off to Akrotiri.

Nothing to do with oxygen or oil shortage I suspect, more a desire to get down and into the bar.

I don't recall either oil or O2 being a problem on the 5 Bahrain trips, but I recall one of the guys on the way back nearly ran out of O2. I am not sure if he had done something to deplete his O2, but when checked by the docs at Binbrook he had very little O2 in his blood. 54 (Phantom) had to fly round the UK for 15 hours before flying Coningsby to Singapore on, I think, Ex Bersata Perdu. I think that this was to prove the Speys would not run out of oil.

Oh, THOSE Lightnings :}

I recall the story of a very early trail to Cyprus. I think it was with Valiant tankers. Over France, spying a large lake with a huge jet of water shooting skyward the Lightning peeled off for a look see.☺

Apparently such deviation was not wholly unknown and played hell with the fuel planning.

Exercise Maple Flag in August '68 was the non-stop deployment of 2 F6 Lightnings of 23 Sqn from Leuchars to Toronto. This was a flight time of 7hrs 20mins and there was no issue with either oil or oxygen in either direction.

Lightning T5 about 40 - 45 mins without a ventral. One trip of 1.25, but that was plugging in to the tanker at top of climb.

22 Jan 1986 saw OP DHONANYI, the recovery of the RSAF Lightnings to the UK. I was the co-pilot on the last VC10K taking the last jets home.....

The beat-ups at Tabuk were getting ever lower and ever faster as the jets left, each one outdoing the previous. 'Our' Lightnings took off and did their 'visual circuit :E ' whilst we took off in ZA141 ('The Lizard'). The air-to-air TACAN spun down at an astonishing rate as the Lightnings caught us in the climb..... If they weren't actually supersonic, they must have been very close to being so!

Handed them over to a Victor over Sicily and popped into Palermo to refuel, then on to Brize.

It must have been a heck of a long time to be strapped to a Lightning; about 4 hours from Tabuk to Sicily and probably a bit more for the remainder of the trip to Warton.

Where they all landed serviceable!

Difinitely not lost, that implies awareness that one doesn't know where one is. In that case they knew exact where they were, over a lake with a fountain. They just didn't recognise it for where it was ☺

I think upper air was not very busy then. In one occasion over France minding our own business at 450, we declined to tell the French our aircraft type except military 4-jet. They were having none of it and we were intercepted by 2 Mirage and 2 CF104.

Fons,

From the Pilot's Notes: (FMk6, in this case, so this also applies to FMk3 & T5. Don't have access to the little-engined Lightning notes)
"Air to air refuelling sorties of up to 11 hours duration are permitted.....
......attention must be paid to the rate of consumption of other aircraft fluids, e.g. oil and oxygen, based on consumption rates recorded from preceding sorties."
MB
Entirely as an aside, most folks I've spoken to who have flown both the clean F-4 (training fit) AND the F Mk6 (war fit!) against each other in 1v1 ACT found them pretty similar in terms of fighting endurance.