(Image: Alan Allen. A spare, unused Lightning fuselage awaits scrapping)
Dumped in the undergrowth of a neglected yard in Staffordshire, England, this innocuous chunk of metal may look like any other piece of industrial scrap. But the article once belonged to one of the Cold War‘s most high performance warplanes – the English Electric Lightning. Well, sort of. It’s actually a spare Lightning fuselage, which was built for attrition purposes but is understood to have never been used.
The rear fuselage section housed the Lightning’s two powerful Rolls-Royce Avon afterburning turbojet engines, which were uniquely configured one on top of the other. The wings were designed to slot into the gap at the front of the article (left of photo) like a giant Airfix kit. The forward fuselage, including cockpit, was then bolted into place.
Stewart Scott, in his book Lightning! Photo Album – Volume One, shows the unused Lightning fuselage from a slightly different angle. The caption reads: “A once brand new rear fuselage section lying in the undergrowth of a Stone (Staffordshire) scrapyard. The 10th edition of the publication ‘Wrecks and Relics’ notes the presence of “at least two ‘spare’ Lightning fuselages, acquired from RAF Stafford”. There has been no entry under Stone since then so it is not known whether or not these sections still exist.”
Scott’s book was published in 1994, reflecting the vintage of the photograph. Though it’s possible that old relics like this can linger on in scrapyards for years (and such places have yielded all manner of treasures over the decades), it’s unlikely that the unused Lightning fuselages have avoided recycling more than two decades later.
But given the ongoing efforts of preservation groups to maintain Lightnings in working order, a spare fuselage or two could prove to be quite a find. Not to mention the surviving cockpit sections that could be mated with a rear fuselage. Then all you’d need is a spare set of wings, tail planes and fin – if such items themselves survive – and you’d have, as Scott says, a “Lightning that might have been!”
Related: The Corroding Hulk of Lightning XM178 at Savigny-Les-Beaune
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