Originally Posted by
kenparry
In my long-gone B737-200 days, I sometimes flew with a colleague who had been on the Trident with BA. He said, with some feeling, that the Trident in hot weather could either turn or climb, but not both, with all 3 Speys working as advertised. It seems you are not the only one who had doubts about meeting the performance requirements.
Here's a comment I posted a few years ago on a thread about Trident performance:
The T3 was a 5-engined airliner of three different engine types . . . Spey (A RR device for turning kerosene directly into smoke and noise, with a bit of residual thrust), Boost & APU . . . so three different sets of limits to learn for the ARB.
We used the boost once every 8 or 10 take-offs. Its unreliability was notorious. I recall doing ATH to LHR in a T3 with a u/s boost on a hot summer's day (remember those?). Boostless, we couldn't lift the required fuel so had to tech stop GVA - highly embarrassing. And a winter OSL to LHR off a slushy runway. Full load of pax but no prob using the boost & contaminated runway perf. Fire up boost just before entering runway. It works! Blip switch from ground idle to flight idle - still working! Capt opens up Speys - and boost promptly dies. Back to the terminal. Eng sucks his teeth. 'Nah, can't do anything here, boys - you'll have to take it home boostless'. Rework contam rwy perf - we can take 40 pax. Luckily the cull had to be done by the ground staff rather than us. So we guiltily left behind approx 100 pissed-off pax.
Once shut down in flight the boost could not be relit . . . which led indirectly to the famous Malaga incident - the guys shut down the boost at 6k on climbout (SOP) after which one of the Speys gave up the ghost, so they diverted to MAD. Instructed by ATC to go around on short final the Tripod wouldn't climb with 1½ of its 3½ donks dead & flew a very low level cct before successfully landing off the next approach. Turned out they were operating outside the WAT limit, although there was no way they could have known that at the time.
Anonymous broadcast (apocryphal) from someone on LHR Tower freq as a T-bird lines up on 28R: 'You're about to witness De Havilland's attempt at the world ground speed record.'