Lockheed P-38 Lightning

A fighter written as an “interceptor”

The P-38 began with a February 1937 Army Air Corps specification, Circular Proposal X-608. It asked for a twin-engine, high-altitude “interceptor” able to reach at least 360 mph (580 km/h) and climb to 20,000 feet (6,100 m) in six minutes.

The word “interceptor” was deliberate. Lieutenants Benjamin Kelsey and Gordon Saville, who wrote the requirement, used it to get around two Air Corps rules: pursuit aircraft could carry no more than 500 lb (230 kg) of armament, and single-seat fighters could have only one engine.

A sister requirement for a single-engine fighter, X-609, produced the Bell P-39 Airacobra. Lockheed won X-608 on 23 June 1937 with its Model 22, a design led by Hall Hibbard and Clarence “Kelly” Johnson.

The Army paid $163,000 for the XP-38 prototype, but Lockheed’s own costs came to $761,000. It was built in a former bourbon distillery that Johnson later counted as the first of Lockheed’s five Skunk Works sites.

Kelsey flew the XP-38 for the first time on 27 January 1939. On 11 February he set off across the country and reached New York in seven hours and two minutes of flying time, not counting two refueling stops; the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force gives the record as 7 hours 48 minutes.

The flight ended badly. Carburetor icing brought the prototype down short of the runway at Mitchel Field, and it was wrecked, but the Air Corps ordered 13 service-test YP-38s on 27 April 1939 anyway.

Lockheed had planned to call the fighter Atalanta. The name Lightning came from the British, who took over a joint Anglo-French order in 1940, and it stuck.

Why the P-38 had twin booms

The layout solved a packaging problem. The booms housed the two Allison V-1710 engines, their turbosuperchargers, and the tail assembly, leaving a short central nacelle for the pilot and the guns.

The two engines turned in opposite directions, which cancelled out propeller torque. The turbosuperchargers let the P-38 perform well at high altitude and also muffled the exhaust, so the Lightning was unusually quiet for a fighter.

All of the guns sat in the nose: one 20 mm Hispano cannon with 150 rounds and four .50 caliber machine guns with 500 rounds each. Wing guns on other fighters had to be aimed to cross at a set distance, while the P-38’s parallel stream of fire could reliably hit targets out to about 1,000 yards (900 m).

The P-38 was the first American fighter to make extensive use of stainless steel and flush-riveted aluminum skin. It was also the first military airplane to fly faster than 400 mph (640 km/h) in level flight.

Inside, the pilot flew with a control yoke rather than a stick. The cockpit ran hot in the tropics, because the canopy could not be opened in flight without buffeting, and cold over northern Europe, because the engines were too far away to warm it.

Compressibility: the dive problem

Early test flights found that as the P-38 approached Mach 0.68 in a dive, the tail shook violently and the nose tucked under. The controls then locked up, leaving the pilot to bail out or wait for denser air lower down.

On 4 November 1941, test pilot Ralph Virden was killed when his YP-38’s tail failed during a high-speed pullout at about 3,500 feet (1,000 m). Wind tunnel tests by NACA eventually showed the cause: at high speed, the wing’s center of pressure moved aft.

Lockheed’s fix was a small dive flap under each wing, outboard of the engines. It was not a speed brake: it changed the pressure distribution so the wing kept its lift, and test pilots proved it in February 1943.

Getting it into service took far longer. Some 200 retrofit kits bound for Europe were lost in March 1944 when an RAF fighter shot down the C-54 carrying them, and the flaps did not reach the production line until June 1944, on the last 210 P-38Js.

That same P-38J-25 block also introduced hydraulically boosted ailerons, which greatly improved the Lightning’s slow initial roll. “We saw compressibility as a brick wall for a long time,” Kelly Johnson said later. “Then we learned how to get through it.”

The P-38 over North Africa and Europe

In July and August 1942, nearly 200 P-38Fs flew across the Atlantic to Britain via Greenland and Iceland, shepherded by B-17s. That made the P-38 the first USAAF fighter to reach Britain and the first fighter delivered across the Atlantic under its own power.

On 14 August 1942, a P-38F flown by Second Lieutenant Elza Shahan helped shoot down a Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor over the Atlantic near Iceland. Second Lieutenant Joseph Shaffer, in a P-40 or a P-39, scored the first hits, and the shared kill was the first Luftwaffe aircraft destroyed by the USAAF.

North Africa was harder. Tied to close bomber escort, P-38 squadrons were attacked from above by German fighters such as the Bf 109, and the type suffered its highest losses of the war in the Mediterranean before its pilots were given free rein in February 1943.

When P-38 groups began flying from England in September 1943, the Lightning was the only fighter with the range to escort bombers into Germany. On 3 March 1944, P-38Hs of the 55th Fighter Group became the first Allied fighters over Berlin.

The Eighth Air Force’s P-38G and P-38H models suffered from engine trouble and bitter cold at high altitude. By September 1944, all but one of its Lightning groups had switched to the P-51 Mustang.

British test pilot Eric Brown gave the harshest verdict. His tests found the Bf 109 and Fw 190 could fight up to Mach 0.75, while the P-38 could not fight faster than Mach 0.68.

The Lightning stayed busy as a fighter-bomber with the Ninth Air Force through the Normandy campaign. Jimmy Doolittle chose one to watch the invasion from the air, and called it “the sweetest-flying plane in the sky.”

The Pacific, where the Lightning made its name

The P-38 was used most extensively and most successfully against Japan. Its range and its two engines suited long missions over open water, and it was credited with destroying more Japanese aircraft than any other USAAF fighter, over 1,800 in all.

It could not out-turn the A6M Zero below about 200 mph (320 km/h). Pilots used its speed and climb instead, making repeated high-speed passes, and the concentrated nose guns were deadly against lightly armored Japanese aircraft.

America’s two top-scoring aces both flew the Lightning: Richard Bong with 40 victories and Thomas McGuire with 38. Charles MacDonald, third among Pacific aces, scored 27 in his P-38 Putt Putt Maru.

McGuire was killed in air combat over the Philippines in January 1945. Bong survived the war’s combat only to die on 6 August 1945, when his P-80 Shooting Star jet flamed out on takeoff; both men are among the best fighter pilots in history.

Charles Lindbergh, flying with the 475th Fighter Group in 1944 as a civilian, showed P-38 pilots how to stretch their range. Running the engines at 1,600 rpm on auto-lean at 185 mph (298 km/h) indicated cut fuel use to about 70 gallons an hour.

The Yamamoto mission

On 18 April 1943, American codebreakers learned that Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, would fly to Bougainville. Sixteen P-38Gs flew 435 miles (700 km) from Guadalcanal at 10 to 50 feet (3 to 15 m) above the sea to avoid detection.

They met Yamamoto’s two G4M “Betty” transports and six escorting Zeros just as they reached the island. One Betty crashed in the jungle and the other ditched off the coast, and Japanese searchers found Yamamoto’s body at the jungle crash site the next day.

The Americans lost one P-38. Rex Barber, flying a borrowed P-38G named Miss Virginia, was later credited with the kill.

“Fork-tailed Devil”: what the Germans called the P-38

The Lightning’s famous nickname is “der Gabelschwanz Teufel,” the Fork-tailed Devil. The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force says German pilots gave it the name during the North African campaign, and Lockheed Martin repeats it.

The evidence for that is thin. The name first appeared in an August 1943 Life magazine article quoting a downed German airman, a piece meant to restore the P-38’s reputation at home, and no earlier German source for it has been found.

The Romanians who met P-38s over Ploiești in June 1944 had their own name for them: “Indians with two feathers.”

What German pilots actually said was mixed. Franz Stigler, a Bf 109 ace, recalled that “one cardinal rule we never forgot was to avoid fighting the P-38 head on. That was suicide.”

Johannes Steinhoff said the Lightning’s turning radius was much smaller than the Bf 109’s. Adolf Galland was unimpressed, comparing its shortcomings to the twin-engine Bf 110 and calling German fighters “clearly superior.”

P-38 variants

After 13 YP-38s and 30 initial P-38s came 36 P-38Ds and 210 P-38Es. The E was the first combat-capable Lightning and settled the classic nose armament of one 20 mm cannon and four .50 caliber guns.

The P-38F (527 built) added racks inboard of the engines for drop tanks or 2,000 lb (910 kg) of bombs. The P-38G (1,082 built) brought 1,400 hp engines and a better radio, and the P-38H (601 built) could carry 3,200 lb (1,450 kg) of bombs.

The P-38J, introduced in August 1943, moved the intercoolers into a distinctive “chin” under each engine and added fuel tanks in the outer wings. A total of 2,970 were built.

The P-38L was the most numerous version, with 3,923 built, 113 of them by Vultee in Nashville. It had 1,600 hp engines, rocket launchers under the wings, and pylons strong enough for 2,000 lb (907 kg) bombs or 300 gallon drop tanks, and deliveries ran from June 1944 to August 1945.

Some 75 P-38Ls were converted into P-38M “Night Lightning” night fighters, with a radar pod under the nose and a cramped second seat for the radar operator. It was one of the first radar-equipped U.S. fighters, and more than 30 mph faster than the P-61A Black Widow.

“Droop Snoot” pathfinders were fitted with a Norden bombsight or an H2X radar. They led formations of P-38s, each carrying two 2,000 lb bombs, and the whole formation released when the pathfinder did.

The F-4 and F-5 reconnaissance Lightnings

Around 1,200 Lightnings, about one in nine, were built or converted as unarmed F-4 and F-5 photo-reconnaissance aircraft, with cameras in place of the guns. Lockheed Martin credits them with 90 percent of the aerial film captured over Europe.

The French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince, vanished in an F-5B on 31 July 1944 after taking off from Corsica. Divers found the wreckage off Marseille, and its identity was confirmed in 2004.

How many P-38s were built?

Most sources count 10,037 Lightnings, and the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force gives 10,038. The P-38 was the only American fighter in large-scale production for the whole of U.S. involvement in the war, from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day.

The Army Air Forces paid $97,147 for each P-38 in 1944, according to the Hill Aerospace Museum. When the war ended, orders for 1,887 more were cancelled.

The 5,000th Lightning, a P-38J named Yippee, was painted bright red and signed by the factory workers. A scaled-up version of the P-38’s wing went onto the Lockheed Constellation airliner. For how the production total compares, see the most produced aircraft of WWII.

After the war

The jet age made the P-38 obsolete almost overnight. Surplus Lightnings in the United States were offered for $1,200 apiece, and those overseas were mostly scrapped or bulldozed.

The last P-38s in U.S. Air Force service retired in 1949. Italy took 100 late-model P-38s and F-5s and flew them until 1956, and Honduras kept its Lightnings into the 1960s.

Civilians found uses too. F-5s flew photo-mapping work for aerial survey companies, and privately owned P-38s raced in the late 1940s. Records indicate the Flying Bulls aircraft flew the 1949 Bendix race as number 14, according to General Aviation News.

Are any P-38 Lightnings still flying?

Yes, roughly ten to a dozen. Wikipedia’s list of survivors counts 26 surviving P-38s, 22 of them in the United States, and says 10 are airworthy, though its own airworthy sections name 12 aircraft. The P-38 National Association’s list, last updated in March 2018, marks a similar number as flying or airworthy.

The best known is Glacier Girl, a P-38F that force-landed on the Greenland ice cap in July 1942. It was recovered in 1992 from under 268 feet (82 m) of ice and flew again on 26 October 2002.

Others include 23 Skidoo, the 5,018th P-38 built, at Planes of Fame in Chino, California. The Flying Bulls’ polished P-38L, the former White Lightnin’, is billed as the only flying P-38 in Europe.

In July 2026 the Flying Bulls brought their Lightning to EAA AirVenture Oshkosh, where it flew in the air shows and parked nose to nose with an F-35 Lightning II. That was the status as of September 2026; airworthy warbirds change hands and go in and out of restoration, so counts move.

Among static examples, the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center, and the Museum of Flight in Seattle each display one. For the fighters it flew alongside, see our guide to American fighter planes of WWII.

P-38 Lightning for sale: what one costs

Airworthy P-38s rarely come on the market. In 2015, the broker Platinum Fighters advertised P-38L 44-53186, then on display in Oregon, for $6.5 million; Wikipedia’s survivor list now places that aircraft with the Collings Foundation.

P-38 vs P-51 Mustang

The two fighters shared the long-range escort job, and the smaller Mustang won it in Europe. It was significantly faster in a dive, which is why it replaced the P-38 in most European fighter groups by mid-1944.

The loss rates were closer than that suggests. In Europe the P-38 flew 130,000 sorties with a loss rate of 1.3 percent, against 1.1 percent for the P-51, which arrived later and benefited from greater numbers and more mature tactics.

In the Pacific, the P-38 remained the USAAF’s primary long-range fighter until large numbers of P-51Ds arrived near the end of the war. We compare the two side by side in P-38 Lightning vs P-51 Mustang.

Explaining the numbers

The full specification table for the P-38 is on this page, and it describes the P-38L. A few of the figures need context.

The speed row is the top speed, 360 knots (414 mph) at military power at 25,000 feet. The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force lists the same 414 mph. Lockheed Martin quotes a rounder 400 mph, and the normal cruise was about 275 mph (239 knots); for how that compares, see the fastest planes of WWII.

The 1,130 nautical miles (1,300 miles) in the range row is the combat range. With drop tanks the ferry range reached 3,300 miles (5,300 km), and other published figures, such as 1,150 miles (Lockheed Martin) and 1,175 miles (Museum of Flight), fall in between without stating the load behind them.

The 1,600 hp per engine is the War Emergency Power rating of the P-38L’s Allison V-1710-111 and -113. The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force and the Museum of Flight list 1,475 hp per engine, and the top speed above was measured at a military power setting of 1,425 hp.

The fuel row’s 420 gal (1,600 L) is internal fuel, rounded from the 1944 pilot’s manual: two 93 gallon main tanks, two 60 gallon reserves, and two 55 gallon outer wing tanks. Two 300 gallon drop tanks added another 600 gallons.

The approach speed comes from the same manual, which tells pilots to start the approach at 120 mph and cross the fence at 110 mph (96 knots). The 21,600 lb (9,800 kg) maximum takeoff weight compares with a normal loaded weight of 17,500 lb (7,900 kg).

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there any P-38 Lightning still flying?

Yes. Roughly ten to a dozen P-38s are airworthy, almost all in the United States, out of 26 survivors. The Flying Bulls’ P-38L is the only one flying in Europe, and it performed at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh in July 2026.

Why did the Germans fear the P-38?

Some German pilots respected its tight turning, fast climb, and heavy nose guns; Bf 109 ace Franz Stigler said fighting a P-38 head on was “suicide.” Others, including Adolf Galland, rated it inferior to German fighters, and until dive flaps arrived in 1944, P-38 pilots were reluctant to follow a German fighter into a steep dive.

What did the Germans call the P-38 Lightning?

The nickname usually given is “der Gabelschwanz Teufel,” the Fork-tailed Devil. It first appeared in a 1943 Life magazine article quoting a downed German pilot, and no earlier German source for it has been found, so its origin is doubtful.

Was the P-38 Lightning a good fighter?

In the Pacific, yes: it was credited with more Japanese aircraft than any other USAAF fighter, and America’s top two aces flew it. In Europe the record was mixed, because compressibility in dives and high-altitude engine trouble led the Eighth Air Force to replace it with the P-51.

How many P-38s were built?

Most sources count 10,037, and the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force gives 10,038. The P-38L was the most numerous version, with 3,923 built.

How fast was the P-38 Lightning?

The P-38L’s top speed was 414 mph (360 knots) at 25,000 feet, and it cruised at about 275 mph. The XP-38 prototype reached 420 mph (680 km/h) during its 1939 cross-country record flight.

What engines did the P-38 use?

Two turbosupercharged Allison V-1710 V-12 engines turning in opposite directions. On the P-38L, the V-1710-111 and -113 were rated at 1,600 hp each at War Emergency Power.

What armament did the P-38 carry?

One 20 mm cannon and four .50 caliber machine guns, all in the nose. The P-38L could also carry up to 4,000 lb (1,814 kg) of bombs on its inner pylons, plus rockets under the outer wings.

How much did a P-38 Lightning cost?

The Army Air Forces paid $97,147 per aircraft in 1944. Today an airworthy example is a multimillion-dollar warbird: one was advertised for $6.5 million in 2015.

Who designed the P-38 Lightning?

A Lockheed team led by Hall Hibbard and Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, working in a secretive group that later became known as the Skunk Works. The company’s fighter line runs from the P-38 to today’s Lockheed Martin fighter jets.