Richard Pike - The Lightning Boys: True Tales from Pilots of the English Electric Lightning

ROGER COLEBROOKS FLAMING FIRST FLIGHT

He gave me a sideways glance but he said nothing at first. We stood by the line hut and I was conscious of his inscrutable expression, his serious, searching eyes. Later these would prove invaluable attributes, no doubt, for this future air chief marshal and chief of the air staff, but this was 1966 Monday 24th October, to be precise and as my flying instructor at the time, he had to make a crucial decision. The slightly-built Flight Lieutenant M J Graydon glanced at me again. He shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. He coughed dryly. The next exercise in the syllabus, he said at last, is to do exactly what weve just done, only this time on your own. He hesitated. Do you think youre up to it?

I paused then said: Yes. Perhaps I sounded a little flat. Maybe I should have felt a little more excited. This, after all, would be my first solo flight in a Lightning aircraft, surely every pilots dream. In truth, though, I saw it as no particular big deal, just another hurdle to be cleared in the seemingly endless air force training machine.

Pilot Officer Roger Colebrook, Hunter OCU 1966.

My instructor nodded. Very well, he said. The engineers will sort out which aircraft youll take. It may well be that one he waved towards Lightning T4 XM 968, a dual-control machine parked near XM973, the T4 Lightning we had just flown together, then you can get going. With its side-by-side dual control arrangement, the Lightning T4s cockpit layout was different from the single-seat Lightning F1A which we would fly later in the course. Prudence dictated that for our first solo flight we rookie students should stick to a familiar cockpit layout.

OK, I said.

At this, we stepped inside the engineering line hut, signed the technical log, briefed the engineers, and headed towards the Lightning pilots crew-room. Coffee? I asked my instructor.

Yes please standard NATO. This meant a mug of white coffee with two generous teaspoons of sugar applied.

A mood of reflection struck me as I dealt with the makings. I was, after all, just a young lad, barely twenty years of age. I only wished that I could have told my parents and my brother this news about my first solo flight on Lightnings. How marvellous if they could have felt proud of me, if they could have shared the moment. But it wouldnt have worked; I could not have told them. It would only have caused upset. My father, as a flight sergeant photographer in the RAF when he retired in 1957, had seemed to resent the fact that I had joined the service as an officer. Not once had he asked me what I did, or what type of aircraft I flew, or about my progress. My mother, God bless her, had no inkling what purpose I served. I had never even told them, for instance, that I had won the Glen Trophy at 3 Flying Training School, a prize awarded to the best overall pilot. That would have been deemed boastful. My brother, four-and-a-half years my senior, was an agricultural engineer and my mother had always blamed his poor performance on the large number of postings that went with service life.

For my own part, I had joined the service for a variety of reasons. I wanted to fly, I wanted to be a fighter pilot, and I liked the idea of a job that involved protecting the country and its way of life. As my training had progressed, I had been impressed by the way the service seemed to offer learning and experience above and beyond pure professional expertise. There was a culture of excellence; meritorious achievement counted above accident of birth. Few cared whether someone had been born into a respectable residence within easy contact of London, or brought up within the grimmer, tighter north, the backstreets of Leeds or Newcastle for instance, with lesser access to style and wealth. Social deference was virtually nonexistent; deference to hierarchical military rank ruled. Beyond this rigid rank-consciousness, service life strived to gloss over the niceties of upper working class, lower middle class, upper this, lower that, middle the other, the subtle variations of social location. Per ardua ad astra was expected and exemplified from the top: the dreary slide of standards of some air marshals-to-be; the sordid ambition (that master-passion which seemed to take the place of honour), even downright incompetence and consequent deflation of ego of an individual sacked, for example, for overzealous home improvement using public funds, or one whose even more zealous extra-marital exposure by the press forced the marshal of the RAF to resignall of that lay in the future. Most Lightning pilots rose above such machinations; maybe a sense of sheer survival made this necessary.

To date I had flown six dual-control flights with my instructor, and a total of just over four flying hours on the Lightning not much for such a powerful, awesome machine. My grand total of flying hours, 325, was significant compared to the poor souls of an earlier generation, the Spitfire and Hurricane pilots of a mere quarter century ago, but was still less than earth-shattering. The Lightning seemed such an enormous beast. After some of the other types I had flown in training, especially the tiny Folland Gnat, the preflight walk-around checks, for one thing, could seem quite intimidating. Remarkably, the Lightning was roughly the same weight as some of the later marks of Wellington bomber used by Bomber Command in the Second World War. Unlike the massive bomb loads of the Wellington, however, an armed Lightning would carry just two missiles and rather puny ones at that, some would say. There was the Firestreak missile, otherwise known as Firewood, or the supposedly more advanced Red Top (dubbed Red Flop by the pilots).