Lockheed P-38 Lightning
Lockheed's P-38 Lightning was the United States' twin-boom, twin-engine fighter of the Second World War. Designed before the war to a specification for a high-altitude interceptor, it matured into a long-range escort, fighter-bomber, night fighter and photographic reconnaissance aircraft, and fought in every theatre, most successfully in the Pacific, where its range and twin engines suited the distances. Lockheed and Convair built 10,038 Lightnings in all.
Why It Mattered
Lockheed's Lightning gave the United States a twin-engine, single-seat fighter that fought over Europe, the Mediterranean and the Pacific in the Second World War. Its great range let it escort bombers deep into enemy territory and hunt over ocean distances that other American fighters could not reach. In the Pacific it downed more Japanese aircraft than any other Army Air Forces type, and the two highest-scoring American aces of the war flew it. More than ten thousand were built, and versions bombed, fought at night and photographed from altitude, making it among the most versatile Allied fighters of the war.
Design Notes
The P-38 broke with fighter convention: its two engines sat in slim booms running back to the tail, while the pilot and the guns occupied a short central nacelle. Clarence "Kelly" Johnson and his Lockheed team shaped it to a demanding 1937 Army Air Corps specification for a twin-engined, high-altitude interceptor. Its Allison V-1710 engines, boosted by turbo-superchargers, drove propellers that counter-rotated, each cancelling the other's torque. All of its guns were concentrated in the nose, clear of the propeller arcs. Speed brought a hidden danger: in a steep dive, compressibility could lock the controls and pull the nose down, a flaw only partly cured by dive-recovery flaps fitted in 1944.
Operational History
The Lightning's first combat missions were photographic: camera-equipped F-4s flew over New Guinea and New Britain in April 1942. In the Mediterranean theatre its pilots flew more sorties than Allied pilots of any other fighter type. Over north-west Europe the principal task became long-range bomber escort, but bitter cold at altitude brought engine trouble and cockpit-heating problems, and from early 1944 the Mustang took over much of the deepest escort work. The Pacific played to its strengths, and its range was used to full advantage over vast stretches of ocean. On 18 April 1943, fourteen Lightning pilots, guided by decrypted Japanese messages, flew 700 kilometres at low level to intercept the aircraft carrying Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto and shot down both bombers. Richard Bong, America's highest-scoring fighter ace with 40 victories, and Thomas McGuire, credited with 38, both built their records in Lightnings. Five hundred of the Lightnings built were photo-reconnaissance models, their cameras replacing the guns.
Afterlife
The Lightning's career was brief once the war ended: production stopped, and the United States Air Force retired the type in 1949. A few served abroad; Honduras, the last military operator, kept its aircraft until 1965. Most Lightnings in the continental United States were offered for sale at $1,200 apiece, and the rest were scrapped. Today fewer than two dozen intact Lightnings survive in preservation, and barely more than a handful still fly. The Planes of Fame Air Museum's P-38J, acquired in 1959, returned to flying condition in 1988 and flies at museum events. The Smithsonian's P-38J, accepted in November 1943, passed into the National Air and Space Museum's custody after the war.