Lockheed P-38 Lightning P-38L

The P-38L closed the development of the Lightning. The English-language encyclopedia describes it, together with the preceding P-38J block, as the “definitive” Lightning, and the Spanish edition calls the chapter “the maturity of the Lightning”. To build it in the numbers the war demanded, Lockheed worked with subcontractors across the country and turned out hundreds of aircraft each month. The result was the most numerous variant of the whole family: 3,923 aircraft, of which 3,810 came from Lockheed and 113 from Consolidated-Vultee.

Licence production is one of the features that set this variant apart. For the first time a second company received a contract to build Lightnings: Consolidated-Vultee, at its Nashville, Tennessee, plant. The initial order was for 2000 aircraft, according to historian John Rickard, but only 113 were completed before the end of the war cut production short. Each factory's aircraft could be told apart by the suffix of the designation: Lockheed machines carried the block number followed by “LO”, as in P-38L-1-LO, and Nashville machines the block number followed by “VN”, as in P-38L-5-VN. The German encyclopedia calls them P-38L-VO; this page follows the “VN” form of the English sources and of Rickard, who writes of the “P-38-VNs (Vultee Nashville)”.

Technically the P-38L was very close to the P-38J. The main change was in the engines: two Allison V-1710-111/113 (F30R/L), one left-hand and one right-hand rotation so that the propellers turned in opposite directions, rated at 1,425 hp military power and able to produce 1,600 hp for short periods at the expense of engine life. The Spanish encyclopedia puts war emergency power with water-methanol at 1725 hp. These engines dramatically reduced the high-altitude engine failures that had dogged the Lightning in Europe. The most common sub-variant was the P-38L-5, which added a cockpit socket into which the pilot plugged his heated suit, a small but welcome improvement on long, cold flights.

The P-38L was also the first Lightning fitted with zero-length rocket launchers. At first seven HVARs (high-velocity aircraft rockets) were carried on pylons under each wing; later came the “Christmas tree” rack, with five rockets in three rows under each wing that resembled an upturned tree. Each aircraft could therefore carry ten 5 in (127 mm) rockets, a large increase in firepower, although the installation added 1,365 lb (619 kg) to the aircraft. The inner stores pylons were strengthened to carry 2,000 lb (900 kg) bombs or 300 US gal (1,100 L) drop tanks. Fixed armament remained in the nose: one 20 mm cannon and four 12.7 mm (.50 in) machine guns.

P-38L deliveries began in June 1944, just as the Lightning was starting to be phased out of the 8th and 9th Air Forces in Europe, so most of these aircraft went to the Pacific. There its range proved decisive: in the second half of 1944 P-38L pilots flying out of Dutch New Guinea were covering 950 mi (1,530 km), fighting for 15 minutes and returning to base. Such long legs were invaluable until the P-47N and P-51D entered service.

Several derived versions were built on the P-38L airframe. Seventy-five aircraft were converted into the P-38M Night Lightning night fighter, painted flat black, with conical flash hiders on the guns, an AN/APS-6 radar pod under the nose and a second cockpit for the radar operator. Hundreds more passed through Lockheed's Dallas Modification Center to become F-5E, F-5F and F-5G photo-reconnaissance aircraft; according to the German encyclopedia, 508 F-5Es came from P-38L-1s and the F-5Fs and F-5Gs from P-38L-5s. A handful were field-modified as bomber formation leaders, the “droop snoots”, with a glazed nose for a Norden bombsight or an H2X radar, and a few others became two-seat TP-38L familiarization trainers.

At the end of the war the USAAF was left with thousands of P-38s made obsolete by the jet age. Some P-38Ls served as test beds: one was experimentally fitted with three .60 in (15.2 mm) machine guns, and another became a “super strafer” ground-attack aircraft with eight .50 in machine guns in the nose and a pod under each wing holding two more, twelve in all. In 1948, according to the English-language list of survivors, the new state of South Korea tried to buy about 100 brand-new P-38Ls stored in the Philippines; the USAF persuaded it to accept AT-6s and worn-out P-51Ds instead, and the Lightnings were destroyed. The last P-38s in US Air Force service were retired in 1949.

Outside the United States, the post-war career of the P-38L was above all Italian. A contract of April 1946 delivered 100 aircraft to Italy, a mixture of P-38L fighters and F-5 reconnaissance conversions; after refurbishing they arrived at the rate of one per month, and all had reached the Aeronautica Militare by 1952. They flew with the 3º and 4º Stormo until they were phased out in 1956, and none survived the scrapyard. Honduras received twelve aircraft after the war, and Nationalist China kept fifteen P-38Js and P-38Ls. One of the Honduran Lightnings, P-38L serial 44-53097, had been built as a P-38L and converted to a P-38M before delivery to the USAAF; it served in Honduras in the 1950s, passed through several private owners and in 1983 was acquired by Doug Champlin, who returned it to single-seat P-38L configuration. It is now displayed at the Museum of Flight in Seattle in the markings of Captain John Purdy of the 475th Fighter Group.

From 1946 through 1949 surplus Lightnings were also stars of the air races at Reno and Cleveland. Marvin “Lefty” Gardner, co-founder of what is now the Commemorative Air Force, bought a mid-1944 P-38L-1-LO that had been converted to an F-5G; that aircraft, 44-53254 “White Lightnin'”, now flies with the Flying Bulls in Salzburg. Many of the Lightnings preserved in museums and in flying condition today are P-38Ls, the version built in the largest numbers.