And the Lightning’s booms were incredibly long, because they had to contain the… ‘An unusual design: The twin-boom layout with a central cockpit nacelle wasn’t all that common in the late thirties.‘Not a lot of people realize just what a box of tricks this baby was, especially when it first came out in the late thirties,’ says Andrew T. The Lightning truly shined in the Pacific theater where it became the standard USAAF fighter in the theater until the closing months of WWII. It first went into large-scale service during the North African campaign in November 1942 and when the Lightning began combat operations from England in September 1943, it was the only fighter with the range to escort bombers into Germany. The versatile P-38 performed many different missions during World War II, including dive bombing, level bombing, bombing through clouds, strafing, photo reconnaissance and long range escort. The P-38J, introduced in August 1943, was the definitive version of the Lightning. Despite the accident, development continued and the first of 13 service test YP-38s flew on Sept. Ben Kelsey set a coast to coast record of 7 hours, 48 minutes in the sleek prototype Lightning, but crashed while landing. The P-38 was originally conceived as an advanced, high-performance twin-engine interceptor. On Feb. Not a lot of people realize just what a box of tricks the P-38 Lightning was, especially when it first came out in the late thirties.
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