Imagine crewing a Tu-95 Bear a little too close to NATO airspace when a pair of English Electric Lightnings arrive to "escort" you back toward the Soviet Bloc. The only feeling that might be analogous would be what I felt in a London pub once, when a drunken American tourist said something naughty to a woman behind the counter. Out of nowhere, five burly Brits appeared in the blink of an eye, two of them vaulting the bar.

My fellow Yank was tossed out the open doorway and into the gutter. A group of office workers nearby chuckled and as I raised an eyebrow, and one told me "one of your countrymen misbehaved." Point taken. I asked for another pint and behaved.

I think of the English Electric Lightning in the same way as those big, yet agile men working the pub: it's a burly brawler, a cudgel and not a dart. It looks blunt with angles few American jets ever sported. Atop that, its later models flew at Mach 2. To my eye, the Lightning is the coolest production flying machine built in the UK Postwar (The Vulcan runs a close second). The two have been placed together at RAF Duxford, where I first saw a Lightning up close. I've not seen the two-seat trainer version in person, the subject of this review. It manages to look at potent as its single-seat sibling.

Even in the shadow of a Vulcan, the Lightning looks scary. Planes like the F-104 appear fast standing still, but the Lightning looks like it does what it does so well with brute force: the stacked Rolls Royce Avon engines are a stunning design feature. Until I did my research when building the kit, I had no idea that the plane was the first in the world capable of supercruise.

I greatly regret that I'll never get to see one fly.

I get to Canada or the UK fairly often, so of course I hunt down local model shops to buy an aircraft in local colors. from the UK I always ship my kits home. While I could buy the same kits here, it's the memory that comes with the kit that adds something intangible to the build.

In 2014, before a walking trip in Scotland, I had a few days in Glasgow with some Scots who have been good friends of ours a long time. They pointed me toward downtown to find a model shop, where I ran across Jamieson's Models; it's since become Scott's Models, located nearby. I urge you to pop in when in Glasgow. The owner and I talked models and the "state of the hobby" a long time before I walked out with a few kits. Sword's kit caught my eye and I wanted something British. For some reason I did not know then, the shop-owner steered me toward other kits. Maybe I told him that I'd recently returned to the hobby and he realized what lay ahead of me. Yet the two-seater just looks right to my eye. I shipped it home.

The end-opening box (careful not to lose parts!) reveals two sprues of parts, as well as resin engines and cockpit. Options for three aircraft appear, as well as both Firestreak and Red Top missiles.

A sheet of photo-etch provides details beyond me in 1/72, at least in 2022 when I finally began building: grab-handles for ejector seats, seat-belts, instrument panels. Since then I've gotten more accustomed to eye-strain.

Sword's instructions are well illustrated but the sprues are not numbered, so one must flip back and forth between a chart of part numbers and the instructions.

That and the box are the downsides, as long as one is prepared for a limited-run and mixed-media kit. I wasn't.

We should be unafraid to share our disasters here. I originally wrote this review in 2022 but did not care for the result enough to share. Now I'll be bold and send it in. The kit also looked better to me when I displayed it in a new case with a white background. I've used that for the photos.

I began with the cockpit, that veritable "kit in itself" and with one exception, I had a fine time building it. It was, in fact, one of the only easy experiences I had with this kit, despite one seat-front being broken when I opened the box. I had to fabricate a new bit out of putty. It went in well.

Once I'd used CA to glue the plane's "office" together, I test-fit it to the fuselage halves. Here, as with the rest of the kit, the lack of nibs for mating parts makes fitment a challenge for those not accustomed to limited-run kits. The first and most serious issue in the build arose: try as I might, the tub would not fit well without a seam so wide as to make the canopy not fit.

I sanded off at least 1/16" of resin in total, taking a bit from each side, until I had a fit. The small resulting seam at the nose and right behind the cockpit took a good deal of work, and I had to re-scribe panel lines with a needle set in a pin-vise, using Dymo label tape to guide my cuts. This practice came in handy later, since the belly needed a similar treatment after some over-zealous sanding. At least the experience helped with my first Rareplanes vacuform kit, where I had to scribe everything.

Try as I might, I never quite removed the seam on the bottom of the fuselage. I let it be, as does not show in the case as it does, glaringly, in my photos.

Save yourself trouble with the forcing-cone and engine front by lots of test fitting. These parts also proved difficult. I found what I thought to be the right spot and got them cemented. In retrospect, I might have reduced the size of the base on which Sword puts the forcing cone, and the fuselage would have fit together without a gap. The cockpit would have still needed a lot of work to fit, but I'd not have experienced all the issues with the plane's nose.

At the other end of the fuselage, I got the resin engine ready. This was easy to saw from its block and even better to paint. In fact, the engine nozzles are my favorite part of the kit.

Wings went on next as well as the vertical stabilizer. The horizontal ones quickly broke off and needed new tabs to stay in place. After much fiddling I got them tacked down at a 90 degree angle. Later I realized that I had the wings without the droop stated in the instructions: that's clearly my fault.

The canopy was not; it never fit. I had to make do with putty, sanding, and more putty to get the canopy nearly flush with the aircraft's nose after installing the hood over the instrument panel. This was, moreover, not the only problem of fitment at this point: the hood proved both too narrow (as if from a single-seat Lightning) and too thick (leading to the canopy issue). I sanded it down on the top until it was nearly transparent; then, the canopy sat nearly flush. For the back portion, it would be posed open to show that fine PE interior (at least the parts I used), so I left it be.

Joe Essid

11 November 2024

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