Tag Archives: P1A

P1A Tucked In The Back

The Boscombe collection has a couple of interesting testbed airframes.  The Avro 707 was in a previous post but another fine jet is the English Electric P1A.  The precursor to what was to become the Lightning, the P1A is very similar in some respects but quite different in others.  The nose is a pitot inlet without the shock cone that the Lightning adopted to house its radar.  The rest of the front fuselage has quite a different shape while it also feels lower to the ground than the Lightning was.  It is nice that a Lightning front fuselage is displayed alongside it for comparison.