English Electric Lightning. Three words which sit so beautifully together (ignoring the tautology of ‘electric’ lightning). The charged air of English skies ripped apart by riveted lunacy.

The Lightning was quite mad- a greedy machine set on eating fuel and turning it into speed. It was so greedy its great gaping mouth was half-full, trying to eats its own nose. Its hunger saw it eating up sky to reach altitudes where few could reach it. Unlike anything else, its engines were stacked one on top of each other, making it stand monstrously tall on the ground.

The Lightning would scorn today’s tedious drones controlled by gamers in porta-cabins. The Lightning was the anti-thesis of the UAV- it was a manned missile, tricksy and twitchy – and it killed more of its own pilots than it did enemies.

It could outfly and outfight any of its peers, but like an English genius, they neglected it and tried to kill it. The English Electric P.1A flew two months after Alan Turing died, another English product killed by a nation that loves to punish its greatest children.

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