The Lightning stacked two jet engines on top of each other
This British Mach 2 fighter carried its two Rolls-Royce Avon engines one above the other inside the fuselage, a distinctly unusual layout. Pilots compared flying it to being saddled to a skyrocket. Its first prototype broke the sound barrier on its maiden flight without anyone noticing for days.
The English Electric Lightning served as an interceptor from 1960 to 1988 with the Royal Air Force, and also flew for Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Its job was specific: protect the airfields of Britain's V bomber nuclear force against Soviet supersonic bombers such as the Tupolev Tu-22, along with slower types like the Tu-16 and Tu-95. It climbed and accelerated superbly, but its fuel supply was small, so range dictated almost every mission.
The design traced back to Teddy Petter, the former Westland chief designer whom English Electric hired in 1944 so it could create aircraft rather than build other firms' designs. In 1947 he pitched a supersonic research plane to the Ministry of Supply, which asked for Mach 1.5 at 50,000 feet. By 1948 his team had settled on stacked engines and a high tail, then pushed wing sweep to 60 degrees for Mach 2 and dropped the tail below the wing after wind tunnel tests. The Royal Aircraft Establishment thought both choices dangerous, and the ministry commissioned a separate low-speed research plane from Short Brothers just to test them.
Roland Beamont flew the first prototype from Boscombe Down on 4 August 1954. A position error meant the Mach meter read only 0.95, so it was flight-data analysis days later that revealed the aircraft had already gone supersonic. The upgraded P.1B went faster still, topping 1,000 mph routinely in trials, and on 25 November 1958 Beamont took it to Mach 2, a first for a British aircraft and second in Western Europe after the French Mirage III a month earlier. The P.1B could plausibly have beaten the world speed record, but it lacked the fuel for the required run in each direction.
Its survival was nearly accidental. The 1957 Defence White Paper bet on missiles over manned fighters, yet the Tu-22 threat would arrive before the Bloodhound II missile was ready, and the Lightning was already flying. The American test pilot Deke Slayton, later a Mercury astronaut, called it his favourite plane of all time, noting its only flaw was that it had no range at all.
Source: English Electric Lightning
