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Profile – English Electric Lightning
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Britain’s Lightning
Britain’s only indigenous production aircraft capable of supersonic speed in level flight – the English Electric/BAC Lightning – represents an aircraft whose history seems to embody all those negative elements which have plagued the British aircraft industry since the end of World War II. Political interference and discouragement, even Service and industry disinterest from time to time all played their parts in Lightning’s story.
Despite all this, the radical aircraft conceived by W. E. W. ‘Teddy’ Petter in 1947 and designed into production by F. W. Page turned out to be a military success and one of the classic fighters of the modern era.
It was the first British fighter designed as an integrated weapon system from the word go . . . as a supersonic point-type interceptor of the type so favoured by the British. With its 60 degree swept and advanced design ‘thin’ wings, engines mounted one on top of the other inside a slab-sided fuselage and advanced avionics, the design which ultimately turned into the Lightning represented a quantum technological leap for not only the English Electric company (which then had its much simpler Canberra bomber in production) but also for the British aircraft industry as a whole.
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