The Lightning’s party trick was real. Using its optimum climb profile with both engines in reheat, it would lift the nose steeply off the runway and settle into a sustained climb of roughly 20,000 ft/min, reaching 36,000 ft in under three minutes. At displays, pilots would rotate into a near-vertical climb straight after take-off, the jet apparently hanging on its afterburners as it disappeared upward — an image that defined the aircraft.

The official service ceiling was kept secret; low-security RAF documents simply said “in excess of 60,000 ft.” In practice Lightnings could zoom-climb far higher: pilots recorded ballistic climbs to 80,000–88,000 ft, and one F.53 was reportedly taken above 87,000 ft over Saudi Arabia. These were not sustained level flight — the aircraft ran out of air to breathe — but they let the Lightning reach targets that were supposed to be untouchable.

Most twin-engined fighters place their engines side by side. English Electric instead stacked the Lightning’s two Avons one above the other, staggered so the lower engine sat slightly forward. Fed by a single circular nose intake that split the airflow vertically behind the cockpit, the arrangement kept the fuselage narrow and cut drag sharply — the thrust of two engines with roughly the drag of 1.5. It also meant there was no asymmetric-thrust problem if one engine quit. The downsides were real: the engines sat close enough that an uncontained failure could wreck both, an engine change on the lower unit was a major job, and leaking fluid onto the hot upper engine casing — which could reach 600 °C, protected by a gold-bearing heat-reflective paint — made fire a persistent worry.

The Lightning’s great weakness was endurance. The original specification asked only for a radius of operation of about 150 miles from its bases, and the thin wings that made it fast left little room for fuel. A full-reheat climb could burn through the tanks alarmingly fast, and typical sorties were short. Designers fought back with ever-larger tanks: a big ventral belly tank (made non-jettisonable and enlarged to 610 imperial gallons on the F.6), enlarged wing leading-edge tanks, and finally jettisonable ferry tanks mounted over the wings. These extended its reach for deployments but capped top speed to around 1,000 mph. The Lightning never shook off its reputation as a thirsty aircraft that had to be flown with one eye always on the fuel gauge.

The Lightning was a 1950s–60s British state defence programme, not an aircraft sold on an open market, so a single tidy flyaway price is hard to pin down. Contemporary figures for a Lightning were of the order of several hundred thousand pounds each in 1960s money — a large sum for the era — and the aircraft was notoriously expensive to keep flying, demanding intensive maintenance because of its complex systems, stacked engines and fire-prone bays. Export customers Saudi Arabia and Kuwait paid a premium for support packages. Any precise cost-per-flight-hour figure you see for the Lightning should be treated as an estimate rather than a sourced number.