Lightning Strikes - English Electrics Supersonic Fighter In Action

Martin W. Bowman’s Lightning Strikes is about the English Electric Lightning, Britain’s supersonic interceptor and possibly the closest the RAF ever came to strapping a pilot to two engines and calling the result defence policy. The Lightning was not designed to charm the air. It was designed to climb very fast, point at incoming trouble, and arrive with the kind of vertical enthusiasm that makes subtle aircraft look as though they are still filling in forms.

This is the Lightning in action: squadrons, pilots, scrambles, interceptions, Cold War readiness, incidents, exercises, memories and the strange daily business of maintaining a machine built less like an aircraft than a national emergency with wings. It existed for the sharp end of the Cold War, when unidentified aircraft on the radar did not inspire philosophical reflection so much as immediate movement, loud engines and someone reaching for a helmet.

The Lightning was gloriously unreasonable. It had astonishing climb, brutal acceleration, short legs, limited fuel, and the general operational manner of a greyhound with a drinking problem. It could get up to altitude with frightening speed, but endurance was not its spiritual gift. This gave it a wonderfully British quality: brilliant, dramatic, slightly impractical, and requiring everyone around it to plan carefully while pretending this was all exactly as intended.

Bowman gives the aircraft its proper atmosphere. Not merely technical admiration, but the life around it: pilots waiting on readiness, ground crews coaxing and cursing, airfields alive with alert routines, QRA sheds, radar calls, noise, vapour, weather, and the old Cold War theatre of men going very fast to inspect whatever the Soviet Union had decided to place near the edge of everyone’s patience. The Lightning was a weapon, certainly, but also a ritual: scramble, climb, intercept, identify, return, repeat, and try not to think too much about what the whole arrangement implied.

There is a fine irony in an aircraft so futuristic now belonging so completely to nostalgia. The Lightning once looked like tomorrow arriving vertically. Now it sits in memory as a beautiful, thirsty relic from the age when British engineering still occasionally produced machines that seemed to ask whether physics was absolutely serious about its rules. It was sleek and brutish at once, a silver dart with a temper, and people who saw one climb tend not to speak of it casually.

For aviation enthusiasts, RAF watchers, Cold War readers, interceptor devotees, airshow nostalgics and anyone who thinks a proper fighter should be able to alarm both the enemy and the fuel accountant, this is prime shelf material. It has speed, noise, photographs, squadron life and that lovely Airlife flavour of serious aircraft affection without requiring the subject to be sensible.

As New copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. Almost suspiciously tidy for a book about an aircraft famous for making the sky shout. A clean, sharp copy of a Lightning volume ready to sit on the shelf with the quiet composure its subject never wasted time developing.

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