A 250-strong team of defence workers from East Lancashire have played a crucial role keeping a famous fighter jet in the skies.

The ‘tooling team’ from BAE Systems site at Samlesbury were called in to carry out never-before-attempted work on the Tornado aircraft flown by the Royal Air Force.

They worked alongside RAF engineers and colleagues from the company’s in-service team from Warton to fix a problem to the top honeycomb panel. Having spotted the problem, the team at RAF Marham, Norfolk, where the aircraft is based, laser-mapped the panel and sent an image through to Samlesbury.