The news that Lockheed's all-new F-35 Lightning II combat aircraft made its first test flight on December 15 got us thinking about the plane's namesake: Lockheed's World War II-era P-38 Lightning, shown to the left, above.
With its sleek lines and distinctive twin-tailbooms, the original Lighting had a dramatic impact in a most unlikely place: postwar Detroit. Harley Earl, the celebrated General Motors design chief after the war,made no secret of his admiration for the P-38. "You have to understand the value of what we saw in that plane's design," he said. "We saw that you could take one line and continue it from the cowl all the way back to the tip of the tail." Meanwhile, the Lightning's distinctive twin boom configuration inpsired Earl's humped taillight design that first appeared on the 1948 Cadillac. Though officially touted as "rudder-type styling," Earl preferred to call them "tail fins," and his Lighting-derived flourish went on to guide automotive design for more than a decade. A side-by-side comparison of a P-38 and a 1949 Caddy shows how the car drew inspiration from the plane:
Fast forward to 2006. The new Lighting, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, will be the dominant aircraft in the NATO arsenal for the next several decades. Envisioned as a stealth-capable, multi-role aircraft, the F-35 will be built in three confugurations (conventional takeoff and landing,short-takeoff and vertical-landing, and carrier-based), and it's already destined to serve in the US, the UK, the Netherlands, Italy, Canada, Norway, Turkey, Australia, and Denmark.
But will the Lightning II influence the design of today's Cadillacs as much as its predecessor did? Arguably, it already has. Though there's no known linkage between the two this time around, looking at the F-35 alongside a 2006 Cadillac CTS suggests that the two nevertheless share several design cues, from their angular beltline creases to the V-shaped cutouts along the leading-edges of the F-35's air intakes and the Caddy's headlight bezels:
Coincidence? We Report. You Decide.
Lockheed F-35 Lighting II (Lockheed Martin Website): LINK
i think that there is a definite link.
i'd bet that all lot of people designing cars these days like planes and stuff.
Posted by: striatic | 13 March 2007 at 01:05 AM