PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Dassualt Mercure Survivors
View Single Post
Old 13th Dec 2010, 16:25
  #5 (permalink)  
Proplinerman
 
Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: Manchester, UK
Age: 66
Posts: 332
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes on 0 Posts
Here's a link to a photo of the one preserved at the Technik Museum in Speyer, Germany:

ScanImage28 580 | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Couldn't agree more with what you say Old China: another prime example is the Trident: HS were completely dictated to by BEA on the Trident 1, so that it was too small to appeal to almost any other airline, the 727, DC9 and 737 waltzing off with massive worldwide sales, while the Trident sold only to BEA, Cyprus Airways, Iraq Airways, CAAC and Northeast (part of BEA by the time they ordered it in very small nos).

Then, to add insult to injury, when BEA found the Trident 1 was too small/getting too small due to traffic growth, they went back to HS to get them to develop (no doubt at considerable expense) the Tridents 2 and 3, neither of which, I think, found any buyers outside of BEA and CAAC. It was only because BEA were forced to order the aircraft (fair enough in the circumstances, as they were responsible for bringing it into being in the first place) in its 1, 2 and 3 form (all the while hankering for the 727), that the production run got to a reasonably substantial total (for a British airliner of that era-it was utterly hammered on sales by the American types mentioned above).

Mind you, HS didn't do themselves any favours by their very generously allowing representatives from Boeing to have a full tour of the factory etc in the early 1960s-enter the 727, the most successful jetliner of all time, until sales of the 737 surpassed its (huge) total.
Proplinerman is offline