Remembering the early days with the legendary English Electric fighter
“Want to occupy the single seat in the single-seater, all-weather, night-and-day, high-flying, supersonic, supernormal Lightning? Want to climb two Everests in three minutes?”
The lines may grate a bit, but the 1962 Air Ministry film Streaked Lightning is great fun. Lasting just short of five minutes and shot in a mix of colour and black-and-white, it contains excellent and dramatic footage of the departure of a No 74 Squadron Lightning F1 taken from the undershoot at Coltishall, high-energy manoeuvring above the clouds and a most impressive night three-ship afterburner take-off. Sixty-one years on, it’s well worth five minutes of your time to watch online. It also serves to demonstrate how the English Electric fighter was, beyond the operational capabilities it offered, perhaps the most potent publicity tool the post-war RAF had yet possessed.
The service was late onto the scene in introducing a supersonic jet fighter. The disastrous Defence White Paper of March 1957 put an end to several promising supersonic projects from Britain’s aviation industry, leaving only English Electric’s Lightning — or P1B, as it was then referred to — to progress to squadron s…
