Almost all of us have made mistakes in our work. Fortunately, most of these mistakes do not result in a scenario of narrowly escaping death and becoming a legend in the aviation community along the way. However, that is exactly what happened to Walter “Taffy” Holden with a famous flight in 1966.
An engineer, Holden joined military cadets to attend college in 1943 and earned a mechanical engineering degree. He gained little experience operating small, single-engine airplanes while training on a propeller airplane called the DHC-1 Chipmunk.
Although Holden gained his flair as a pilot, he continued his career as an engineer and in 1966 became commander of the Royal Air Force (RAF) Maintenance Unit 33 at RAF Lyneham. But his experience with small, slow, and simple airplanes had not prepared him to fly one of the fastest jet fighters of the generation.
Holden’s unit was maintaining the English Electric Lightning F.1 first-class jet fighter. Powered by two massive engines and built to travel in straight lines at speeds of up to Mach 2 (2,470 km/h), the Lightning was an incredible feat of engineering. It had afterburner engines that ejected the fire beams seen behind supersonic jets, and was the first jet to not need these afterburners to sustain supersonic flights.
Taffy was working on the jet that day in history, trying to replicate an electrical problem that occurred when the plane was spinning fast. He got into the cockpit to give it some speed, but accelerated so much that it started the afterburners and caused a power surge that swept down the track.
Walter “Taffy” HoldenThis problem may seem like it can be fixed by simply turning off the engines. But the jet in question had locks on the throttle after the afterburners were activated, and Taffy had not been trained in how to release them. Luckily, before maintenance, someone had told him how to do this, but he was going too fast and had to avoid another plane in front of him. This decision, which took place very quickly, chose to take off instantly.
Unhelpful, unable to communicate with someone who really knows how to fly the jet, and with the landing gear locked in the down position, Taffy sped across the runway and narrowly avoided colliding with other planes before leaving the ground. He tried to activate the emergency ejection, but the ejection seat was in service mode and thus got stuck inside.
He managed to disable the engines and tried to spin the jet to land on a different runway. The first attempt did not look good, so Taffy aborted the landing and later canceled the second attempt.
Eventually, he managed to come at the right angle and go slow enough to land, then using a maneuver called a “taildragger” to slam the tail of the plane onto the runway. While this maneuver wasn’t ideal for Lightning, he had learned it from single-seat planes. Taffy came out and reportedly apologized, saying “I’m so sorry Sir”.
The aircraft was repaired, returned to service and now stands completely intact in the Imperial War Museum in Duxford.
Taffy was found to act in the best interests of him and the aircraft, and continued to serve in the RAF until his retirement years later. He died in 2016 at the age of 90, leaving behind this hilarious and much-loved tale of an engineer who accidentally flew a jet.
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