Does anyone have anything nice to say about The Trident?
I think it was the most technically advanced aircraft of its era. It had (IMHO) excellent flying qualities throughout most of the flight envelope but was marred by inadequate performance which was the result of all the b****ing about done by BEA’s management at the very beginning to reduce the basic design requirement. That resulted in it being very difficult to stretch and improve commercially. All the “stretching” done from the 1C to the 3B really just put it back to where it should have been in the first place and exhausted the potential. A T3 with more powerful engines from day 1 could have been stretched to a 200 seater and would have been a real world-beater.
Two examples of its good points. I flew the Trident from early T1 introduction to the point where it started being replaced by the 757 - BA was the launch customer for the 757 along with Eastern. I was lucky enough to be involved on the BA/BALPA 757 liaison team, so we saw a lot of the development work from the inside and got to know a lot of the Boeing test pilots and engineers.
When I managed to get qualified on the 757 fairly soon after it was introduced, there was a conversation with some of the Boeing guys (maybe together with Peter Harper who was the BALPA Tech Committee chairman at the time and also qualified on it) along the lines of “how do you like your new ship?” To which the reply was while we LOVED the power and performance, we weren’t very impressed by the flying qualities which seemed like a step backwards. A Trident handled like a sports car in terms of control response especially in roll, it also had very little trim change with speed and configuration and very light control forces. With a 757 if you took the wheel and rotated it quickly it from one side to the other and back to neutral, the aircraft would just sort of “turn round and look at you” as if to say “oh, are you talking to me?”. Similarly, with an asymmetric approach, every time you changed the power, you had to re-trim in all three axes.
Maybe these comments were slightly exaggerated for effect, but the Boeing guys were astonished and said that we ex-Trident pilots were the only people who had commented negatively about the 757’s flying qualities. But the only other people who had been exposed to it at that time were accustomed to other Boeing and/or Douglas products and measuring from a different "norm".
Another early experience was when I flew a 757 service which replaced the Trident on either Brussels or Amsterdam, and we had thick fog. I had to delay departure for quite a while till the RVR improved as the lowest 757 takeoff RVR was higher than that of the Trident with its PVDs. It was caustically noted by some of our regular passengers the old T1s that were then being broken up had a better all-weather capability than their shiny new replacements!