Lockheed XP-58 Chain Lightning

The Lockheed XP-58 Chain Lightning resulted from a US Army contract, of 27 April 1943, which tasked Lockheed to build 'one (1) airplane, pursuit, fighter, two-engine, two-place, known as the XP-58, complete and conforming to the contractor's specifications'. The big, twin-boom XP-58 'convoy fighter' followed in the tradition of the P-38 Lightning and experimental XP-49 but had almost nothing in common with them - not dimensions, not components, not performance. The XP-58 owed its origin to Colonel Elliot Roosevelt, son of the President, who almost alone created the notion that a brute-sized, awesomely-armed escort fighter was needed. Roosevelt, however, really wanted Howard Hughes, not Lockheed, to build it.

The first of two XP-58s began taxi tests in 1943 and took to the air very belatedly on D-Day, 6 June 1944. The second airframe was never fully completed but was trucked in parts to the super-secret test centre at Muroc Dry Lake, California. By the time Howard Hughes' competing machine, the XF-11 reconnaissance craft, flew in 1946, the 'convoy fighter' idea had been dropped and the sole flyable XP-58 was a relic, abandoned to the elements after being moved to Wright Field, Ohio.

Its first flight was a 50-minute shakedown which took the XP-58 from the manufacturer's Burbank plant to Muroc. From 6 June to 8 September 1944, Lockheed pilots put 19.3 hours on the airframe. On 22 October 1944, it was ferried to Wright Field where it performed well in tests but, because of the cost of continuing a marginal programme with a 'one-off' machine, even with a second for spare parts, the programme was terminated in 1945. Derelict at Wright Field as late as January 1946, the Chain Lightning was scrapped in 1947.

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