For sheer beauty in flight, the Lockheed P-38 Lightning captured a rare balance between pre-war art and World War II power that still turns heads, especially at venues like EAA AirVenture Oshkosh.
The much-anticipated return visit to the U.S. of the P-38 long known as Lefty Gardner’s “White Lightnin’” gave Lightning lovers lingering looks at this mesmerizing machine. Red Bull, and its Flying Bulls subset, own this P-38 and typically tour Europe with it from a base in Austria.
A star during a Warbirds in Review session at the 2026 show, the gleaming P-38 Lightning parked nose to nose with a fifth generation fighter, the modern F-35 Lightning II. If it was a beauty contest, the P-38 walked away with the prize.
The P-38 uses a pair of Allison V-1710 liquid-cooled V-12 engines.
Flying Bulls pilot Raimund Riedmann described the P-38: “We decided to keep it in the same configuration as Lefty Gardner had it,” referencing the use of more streamlined engine nacelles from an earlier model Lightning than this P-38L came with from the Lockheed factory.
That sleek look was a hallmark of this P-38 when Lefty flew it.
Lefty and fellow Confederate Air Force (now Commemorative Air Force) founder Lloyd Nolen acquired it in the early 1960s. A check into records indicates the Red Bull P-38 flew as a Bendix racer in 1949 with race number 14.
Back then owner J.D. Reed used registration NX25Y, later changed to N25Y, which it carries to this day. Gardner and Nolen found N25Y in the weeds in Yukon, Oklahoma, according to vintage Commemorative Air Force (CAF) articles.
The Lightning quickly became Lefty’s mount for air shows and later air racing. For years, it carried versions of the fledgling CAF’s paint scheme of white overall with red and blue trim, with the occasional Confederate flag.
That white paint, and the aircraft’s name Lightning, made it pretty well unavoidable that this machine would get the nickname White Lightnin’, shared with moonshine in southern U.S. lore.
In June 2001, with Lefty’s son Ladd Gardner in the P-38’s seat, a disintegrating turbosupercharger sent shrapnel flying into a fuel line, causing a fire in the left boom and smoke in the cockpit as he sought refuge in a cotton field in Mississippi, handling the unfolding drama with aplomb. Down but not out, White Lightnin’ was sold to the Flying Bulls in Austria in 2005.
Nelson Ezell’s warbird rebuilding facility in Breckenridge, Texas, remade N25Y for Red Bull in three years, tackling daunting fire and crash damage and modernizing some systems. And, as current pilot Raimund Riedmann noted, the Red Bull organization opted to keep the early-style streamlined nacelles.
Gone is the White Lightnin’ paint. The P-38 now sports a dazzlingly bright polished skin, kept that way during AirVenture by attentive Flying Bulls staff, ever mindful of the organization’s top-tier expectations when showing aircraft to the public.
The shiny P-38 was a hit when displayed in the Warbirds area, as well as when it flew during the week of AirVenture. The Lightning was scheduled to perform in air shows on Monday and Wednesday. During the Monday show, the Lightning paired up with Red Bull’s Douglas DC-6B airliner.
Pilot Raimund told the Warbirds in Review crowd the P-38 “is very easy to fly because of the counter-rotating propellers.”
He added he finds the fighter stable on takeoff and landing because of its tricycle landing gear.
There is a potential for overheating while on the ground, he added, saying he prefers to take off within five to seven minutes of cranking the engines, with heat issues possibly manifesting themselves by 20 minutes on the ground on a hot day.
Today, the Red Bull Lightning is touted as the only flying P-38 in Europe.
For more information: FlyingBulls.at
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