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The English Electric Lightning is a British fighter aircraft that served as an interceptor during the 1960s, the 1970s and into the late 1980s. It is capable of a top speed above Mach 2 . The Lightning was designed, developed, and manufactured by English Electric .
The aircraft landed safely but was relegated to ground training use. [5] 10 May 1971 – Lightning F3 XP744 of No. 56 Squadron RAF was abandoned after a fire warning 15 miles west of RAF Akrotiri, Cyprus. [5] 26 May 1971 – Lightning F6 XS902 of No. 5 Squadron RAF was abandoned following an engine fire 15 miles north-east of Grimsby ...
The English Electric Lightning was a high-performance short-range interceptor aircraft. The Lightning had a max takeoff weight of 20 tons, and could reach Mach 2.0. [1] The aircraft involved in the incident was the second production Lightning, designated XM135. [2]
On 7 July 2006, the U.S. Air Force, the lead service for the aircraft, officially announced the name of the F-35: Lightning II, in honor of Lockheed's World War II-era twin-propeller Lockheed P-38 Lightning for the United States Army Air Forces and the Cold War-era jet, the English Electric Lightning for the Royal Air Force. [22] [a]
The F-35 was the product of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program, which was the merger of various combat aircraft programs from the 1980s and 1990s. One progenitor program was the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Advanced Short Take-Off/Vertical Landing (ASTOVL) which ran from 1983 to 1994; ASTOVL aimed to develop a Harrier jump jet replacement for the U.S. Marine Corps ...
RAF Coltishall became home to the RAF's first English Electric Lightning F.1s when No. 74 (Fighter) Squadron began to receive the jet in June 1960, after arriving the year before. No. 74 (F) Squadron relocated to RAF Leuchars in Scotland on 2 March 1964. [6]
The English Electric Lightning was one of the first aircraft to exceed the speed of sound in level flight without using afterburning. Concorde routinely supercruised most of the way over the Atlantic, enabling it to travel from London and Paris to New York in just over three hours, a record which has yet to be surpassed by any other commercial aircraft.
The Lightning Force HQ was the organisation controlling the operations of the Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightning aircraft of the Fleet Air Arm and Royal Air Force. Following on from the principles developed in the operation of the UK's previous STOVL aircraft, the Harrier , the formation is a joint organisation falling under RAF Air Command .