Lightning Assembly: A Series of Photographs Illustrating the Construction of the English Electric Supersonic Fighter Aircraft

The first pre‐production English Electric Lightning made its first flight on April 3, 1958, and by December of that year the first six had flown. By September 1959 all twenty pre‐production aircraft had been completed. Despite the Mach 2 capability of the Lightning it was designed so that many of the existing machine tools and production methods could be used in its construction. A number of new processes, such as skin routing, titanium forming and stainless steel manipulation have been introduced. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the Lightning is that its structure is almost entirely conventional with aluminium alloys forming the basis of the load‐carrying elements.