Condividi questa storia The runway at RAF Lyneham on the morning of 22 July 1966 held one of the least likely aeroplanes in Britain: a Lightning interceptor with no canopy, a disarmed ejection seat, its undercarriage pinned down, and a man in the cockpit who was wearing no helmet, had no radio, and had never flown a jet in his life. None of that was a problem, because the aircraft was not supposed to leave the ground. Wing Commander Walter Holden, known to everyone as Taffy, was chasing an electrical fault that only revealed itself at high power. The test was simple: run the engines up, throttle back, brake, repeat. On one of those runs the throttles went one notch too far, past the gate and into full reheat, and the second Lightning ever built took a 39-year-old engineering officer flying for twelve minutes.

A test that did not involve flying

No. 33 Maintenance Unit at Lyneham was a storage and disposal outfit, and XM135 was passing through it. The fault was the kind that engineers hate: intermittent, and only present under takeoff power. Someone had to sit in the cockpit and reproduce it. No test pilot was available, so the unit's commanding officer did it himself. It is worth being precise about Holden's background, because the story is usually told as though a random mechanic climbed in. He had earned pilot's wings during an RAF cadetship and had flown Tiger Moths, Harvards and Chipmunks. He was, however, an engineer by trade and by posting, years out of currency, and he had never flown anything with a jet engine. Some accounts call him a qualified pilot and others say he was not one at all. The useful truth sits in between, and either way nothing in his logbook had prepared him for a Lightning. The jet was rigged so that flight was impossible by design. The canopy was off so electrical looms could be run out of the cockpit. The ejection seat was made safe. The undercarriage was pinned down. Communication with the ground crew was by hand signal.

Past the gate

On the Lightning, the throttles pass a detent before entering reheat. Holden pushed them past it. Both Avons lit, and the aircraft began accelerating down the runway with a man aboard who could not talk to anybody and could not get out. By the time he had wrestled the throttles back, there was not enough runway left to stop. What lay ahead of him was a fuel bowser crossing the strip, a de Havilland Comet lifting off, and, past the airfield boundary, a village. Lyneham was a Transport Command station, so there was a great deal of large aluminium about. He pulled back on the stick. It was the only option that did not end in a fireball.

Twelve minutes, no canopy, no radio

What followed is the part that still makes pilots wince. Holden was now airborne in a supersonic interceptor with the slipstream tearing through an open cockpit, no helmet, no radio, no ejection seat worth the name, and no training on the type. The Lightning is not a forgiving aeroplane to learn on. It was built to get to altitude faster than anything else in Europe, and it drinks fuel doing it. He worked the aircraft out as he went, flew a circuit, and set up to land. The first approach was wrong on speed and height, so he went around. The second was wrong too. He went around again. On the third approach he got it down. He also, by his own account, forgot a fundamental point about the machine he was flying. Holden had learned to fly taildraggers, which are landed nose-high. The Lightning has tricycle gear and does not appreciate the same treatment. The tail struck the runway and severed the brake parachute cable, which removed his best means of slowing down. He stopped on brakes alone, burning them out, with roughly a hundred yards of runway to spare.

The inquiry, and the aircraft that outlived it

There was an inquiry, as there had to be. It cleared Holden of breaching flight orders and concluded that he had saved both himself and the aeroplane. Air Marshal Sir Kenneth Porter reviewed the proceedings and, in the most magnificently understated question in the file, invited Holden to agree that the test would have been better left to an experienced and current Lightning test pilot. Holden's career survived. He stayed in the RAF, retired in the following decade, and died in 2016 at the age of 90. XM135 was repaired, went back to work, and finished its flying life with 1,343 hours on the airframe. The Imperial War Museum acquired it in 1974, and it has been at Duxford ever since, with a plaque in the cockpit that tells visitors what happened on that runway. The clip above is the one worth your time: Holden himself, decades later, back beside the aircraft that took him for a ride.

When you could book a Lightning yourself

Here is the part of the story that lands closer to home. For a stretch of the 2000s, a civilian could do deliberately what Holden did by accident: buy a seat in an English Electric Lightning and go supersonic in it. MiGFlug offered those Lightning flights to its own customers, alongside rides in the Blackburn Buccaneer. Paying passengers went supersonic to altitudes around 50,000 feet, in the same type of aircraft that had taken Taffy Holden into the air without asking him first.

MiGFlug’s Lightning flights ran until 2010. Nobody has offered them since. YqD2DKvYyJE" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;border:0" allowfullscreen>