When Coventry-born Sir Frank Whittle unveiled the design for his prototype jet engine, experts believed the 1,000-pound thrust it could produce “wouldn’t blow the skin off a rice pudding”.

Luckily, what the Air Ministry first considered “impracticable” became the foundation of the modern Royal Air Force.

But at 8.08pm on June 6, the first four F-35 Lightning II jets used their 40,000 pounds of thrust to land at RAF Marham in Norfolk, having flown across the Atlantic in a 6,440km (4,000 mile) marathon mission.

The cutting-edge single-seat, single-engine aircraft took off from a US Marine Corps Station in South Carolina and were flown by British pilots from the newly reformed 617 Squadron, immortalised by the Dambusters raid in the Second World War.

Britain has committed to buying 138 F-35 fighter aircraft and has so far bought 48 at a cost of £9.1 billion.