L-1011 produced a love-hate relationship among those working it. In 1972, the first year in service, EAL started Tristar (Whisperliner) service to BDA Because the aircraft at that time was a flying "glitch" I, or one of my tech supervisors had to fly on the single round trip each day. So for four summer months I sat on the best cockpit jump seat in the world every day making a round trip to BDA from JFK. The view was superb, huge side window right next to me and I had perfect vision forward over the Captains shoulder.
No sightseeing time in BDA though, I had to sort out problems aiding our Bermuda mechanics and am proud to say never took a delay or cancellation in coming back. Next summer, because we were operating three flights a day I had to suffer and stay down there for three weeks. I grudgingly split the rest of the summer's duty with my tech team.
The first L-1011 EAL disposed of was MSN 1012 (N311EA) which was notorious for its wiring problems. It was the last of the hand wired ones where they laid the wire looms in the aircraft and then tried to find the right place to put each indivi9dual wire. On the DITMICO test they found several thousand faults, corrected them but didn't repeat the test. We were still finding wiring glitches years later.
The aircraft was sold to a group for conversion to a freighter. A Miami repair station started the conversion, stripped the interior, removed all the pax window frams, scabbed over them and then abandoned the job. By then I was Director of Contract Maintenance in Miami and we towed the stripped hulk over to our hangar. We tied the structure back together, prepped it for ferry and it went off to PEMCO in Dothan Alabama.
It was converted and languished for a while for, being a early -1 model it had limited lifting capacity. It was finally leased to Tradewinds of Greensboro, North Carolina and operated happily for many years. It had been stripped of all its passenger goodies, one air conditioning pack was removed and itd didn't do autolands so no need to do Gold Wire checks. Strangely, I became the DQC there.
It was cheap to operate. We didn't overhaul engines. We bought stored, out of service L-1011's, stripped the engines which still had a few hundred cycles and hours of service left and used them. Scrapped the aircraft of course. Tradewinds operated some ex-Gulf Air -200's for a while but the pax charter market was too tough.
That is where I learned to like the RB-211-524. Eventually, some expensive AD's caught up with the Tristar and we went to A300's. N-311EA went to Asia.