B.A.C. (English Electric) Lightning F. Mk.1 - Fictional users

We start with what we hope will be a saga throughout our blog: The fictional users.

We have choosen two users for this airplane, Republican Spain and Rhodesia.

• Republican Spain: In real timeline, the United Kingdom set-up an arms embargo against the Francoist Spain. It's feasible to think that if a democratical Republic had won the civil war (and, if that was the case, also went through the World War 2 allied with UK and France) that government would be a good customer for British arm industries.
• Rhodesia: Once the Rhodesian Bush war was won by the Rhodesian government and, in order to secure their airspace from Angolan and Mozambican incursions, they bought some obsolete interceptors from the UK that, in Rhodesia weren't so obsolete.

B.A.C. (English Electric) Lightning F. Mk.1/Mk.2 - British users

We finish with the domestic users for this British bird of the 60s.

The English Electric Lightning flew for the first time on December 1959. And it entered into production and frontline duty on 1960.

It achieved an excellent performance, and was very easy to fly, however, during the first months of service the serviceability was very poor because of the lack of spare parts and the inadequability of the ground equipment to serve correctly these airplanes. The first squadron to fly them, was the No.74 Squadron. at Coltishall, on 1960.

An improved version, the Mk.1A featured better avionics and could support an air-to-air refuelling probe.

The F. Mk.2 was an improved version that flew first on 1961 and entered service with the 19th squadron on 1962 and with the 92nd one in 1963. Conversion that was made possible thanks to the 226th OCU (Operational Conversion Unit).

Due to the better performance of the McDonnel-Douglas F-4 Phantom II, which were better both in range and speed, and the development of the co-joint project, Panavia Tornado, they were replaced, mostly by this last one, with it's interceptor variant, the F.3.

They served in most of the operational theaters, from the United Kingdom to Singapore passing through Cyprus and Germany.

EDIT: In order to see the image in it's proper size, click on it, then right click on it --> copy image address, open a new tab on your browser and then paste the copied address.

B.A.C. (English Electric) Lightning F.52 (Mk.2) - Saudi users

Today we make a huge step forward... up to the late 50s and 60s! With this British supersonic fighter.

The English Electric Lightning is a British supersonic fighter of the cold war. It was designed and manufactured by the English Electric company first and by the British Aircraft Corporation (B.A.C.) later after the first company was absorbed by the second one. It was the only British fighter of those decades that could achieve mach 2 speed. In this variant (F.52) was only operated, in small numbers, by the Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF).

The F.52 was a slightly modified version of the F.2 prepared to be exported to Saudi Arabia.

Given the urge of the Saudi government of improving the defenses of their airspace due to the Egyptian incursions which were supporting the Yemeni Republicans in the context of the North Yemen civil war (civil war, where the monarchicals were openly supported by the Saudis) back in 1965. They ordered a number of multi-role lightning F.53, lightning T.55 some BAC Strikemaster and some American Hawk surface-to-air missiles.
Because of the urgency of the situation, they close a new urgent deal codenamed "Magic Carpet" where the British government sold them four additionnal F.52 plus another one in order to replace a lost in an accident one. Just after their arrival, they were deployed in the Khamis Mushait airfield, close to the Saudi-Yemeni border and were piloted by mercenaries.

EDIT: We forgot to mention that, the registrations and the colours themselves should be considered speculative.