Interesting aircraft: Lockheed P38 'Lightning'

Glacier girl

Its time for another favourite aircraft, and here is a real beauty, one of my all time favourite flying machines; the incomparable Lockheed P38 Lightning.

The Lightning is a fantastic machine, a super performance long range fighter, years ahead of its time, with two engines to give it an abundance of power and a top speed of 580 kmh at altitude, making it faster than the P51 Mustang.

When I say this aircraft was ahead of its time, I mean that literally. Where as the Mustang was a child of the war, born of immediate neccesity, the Lightning was designed in 1937 and there is some kind of irony in debates which pit the Mustang against the Spitfire when asking which was the best fighter of the second world war. Neither was. The best fighter in my opinon was the P38 and it proved this many times over. It was the longest serving US fighter of the war, the only one to see service for every day of the conflict. It was the first US aircraft to shoot down a Japanese aircraft and a German and it was the aircraft flown by America's top two aces of the war; Richard Ira Bong and Thomas McGuire.

The reasons why the P38 was so good are multiple, but perhaps most obvious is the planform which allowed for great power and maneuverability, very few other aircraft employed the twin boom configeration and none were front line fighters, except perhaps the Northrop P61 Black Widow (another outstanding aircraft). Another reason for P38 supremacy was its weaponry. Both the weapons and the pilot sat in the central nacelle, which meant the pilot was sitting in line with four Browning .50 machine guns and a 37mm auto-cannon. Later they replaced the latter with a 20mm auton-cannon, but the effect was much the same; all its weapons clustered in a central firing position meant the P38 could hit targets at twice the range of a conventional fighter because the pilot didn't have to bother about converging fields of fire. Furthermore having the heavy weaponry clustered into a tight firing line meant when the P38 hit its target, it had a tendency to chew through it like a chain saw. With hindsight, its not hard to draw a parrallel with the main gun of an A10, the effect must have been similar, especially as P38's were often used for attacking ground targets. Add to this, ten 127mm High Velocity Aircraft Rockets (when fired in salvo these had the same capacity for destruction as a cruisers broadside) and the P38 is nothing if not a menace (and I haven't even mentioned the 1,800kg internal payload).

The reason why I love this aircraft is not just its high performance and reputation, but mostly its shape. I've always liked twin engined aircraft, but this one is something special. It looks like it was built for more than just high speed. It has the sort of graceful brutality that reminds me of 1960's muscle cars. The Lightning is a smooth, streamlined air combat predator and it can kill anything it meets with incomparable ease. The fact that its bigger than most contemporary fighters just makes it look all that much more menacing.

P38 Lightning in the foreground with a P51 Mustang and a P47 Thunderbolt

Down he went... heh heh...

The video in its entirety can be seen here; 1 2 3 4 5 though it shoud be noted this documentry is actually about dogfighting in the Vietnam war.



edited to add;