tornadoken
You are of course correct in saying the "root issue was splitting the market by launching both,... two essentially identical aircraft." There were a lot more though that impacted Lockheed.
The Rolls Royce receivership caused a layoff of engineering staff at Lockheed. When Rolls was bailed out there was a terrible loss of continuity as new people tried to pick up the design threads. At Eastern, we used to joke we were maintaining an aircraft built by two bankrupt manufacturers.
The decision to size the center engine inlet duct for the smallest of the three new large fan engines meant that re-engining the L-1011 was not possible. The fin structure would not allow it. The best that could be done was upgrading to the RB-211-524 which fortunately was a far, far, far better engine and more powerful than the problem plagued RB-211-22B.
The initial engine model was the derated Rolls Royce RB-211-22C. The -22B which replaced it early on had two catastrophic uncontained failures of the fan disk (EAL and TWA). Most luckily the heavy parts did not go into the fuselage although a fan blade did penetrate and lodge in the outer pane of a pax window. This caused frequent replacement of fan disks, 150 cycles seems to be in my head but its been a long, long time.
Starting the 22B in cold weather resulted in fogging out the ramp in unburned kero smoke. It was painfully slow to start as I demonstrated to one of our Miami based powerplant engineers. I shamed him to come up to Toronto one moderately cold night. I started engines off the APUat about 2AM. The cold-soaked engines took, in the worst case, six and a half minutes (6 1/2) from initial press of the start button to reach ground idle. Later that AM the engineer and I witnessed the EAL L-1011 and an AA DC-10 pushed back from their gate simultaneously. I kid you not, the DC-10 was on takeoff roll before the third engine on our airplane started and the ramp area was wreathed in while smoke.
The 22B had a poor compressor stall margin and I think I have, in other threads described how I witnessed three center engine stalls in one day with loss of turbine blades during a freezing rain storm at KBDL. A week later I was riding a cockpit jump seat when another center position -22B spit out fire and blades in freezing rain at KBDL The tower asked us if the pyrotechnics were a usual feature of L-1011 takeoffs. In the short term a mandatory 2 1/2 minute warmup at high power just prior to takeoff alleviated the condition. It made us unpopular with the control towers.
The topper was the -22B N1 location bearing which could partially fail, then catch fire internally and release the whole fan assembly. We did experience that. This led to the AD requiring the installation of a movement detector to warn of the initial stage of a bearing failure. It was very expensive and led to the retirement of N311EA (MSN 1012) from Tradewinds. It was the sole -1 freighter conversion.
Lockheed, being out of the commercial market for so many years after the L-188 Electra had training problems. I was in the second training class at Palmdale in 1971 and many instructors were ex-USAF with no commercial background who found themselves facing very experienced airline technical people instead of recruits.
While MDC made provision for a center landing gear on the DC-10, Lockheed did not, limiting the maximum gross weight. Proposals for a third wheel on each axle would have made the aircraft look pregnant with bulged landing gear doors. To get range LAC had to go to the short -500 model with wing extensions which then required active ailerons for stress damping.
LAC never built any Tristars with main deck cargo door while MDC made many pure freighter and Combi DC-10 models. There were even more DC-10 after-market conversions while the Tristar had very few. UPS had studied L-1011 freight conversions but decided against them. There were (I think) only seven civil freight conversions, one -1 and six -200 models.
The rear spar suffered failures. In my office at one time, I had a large piece of dural plate that had cracked right across, a piece of rear spar web removed from N311EA. It was not the only one. Post 2000, the FAA came up with additional requirements for structural mods to the wings which also must have pushed the aircraft out of service.
The L-1011 certainly had a more advance flight control system and pilots uniformly loved its handling qualities. The AFCS was ahead of its time.
However, the comparison of sales figures tells a story. So does the comparison of after-market freight conversions. Telling too is the disappearance of the aircraft from service. May 411A forgive me.
Last edited by tonytales; 22nd Jul 2017 at 22:44.