surplus power on approach or not!
Did my annual route check with one of the few who stood up against management at the papa india inquiry.
It was in the days before the Dibley descent computor - which was aimed at fuel saving and not dragging the beast in for the last 15 miles.
Did a perfect one into marseilles - spooled the engines up around 5 miles - you couldn't do it that late with some of the guys (in my final company we did it around 2 miles - but that is another story)
Last sector of the day was into heathrow at close to max landing weight onto 27 or 28 right.
ATC asked the preceding to keep 180 knots to the outer marker but unfortunately it was Alitalia whose english is marginally better than the Frogs.
The DC8 reduced to final approach speed as they didn't understand the instruction.
We were instructed to reduce to minimum safe speed but were still 20 knots plus faster than the Italians and around two grand we were told to execute a standard missed approach.
TOGA - advance the throttles and rotate to Go around attitude - check the speed before calling for the gear and flaps - forget the order for retracting them in BEA - and the speed had dropped around 10 knots below final approach speed.
Had never been in that situation before - nor were we trained to think.
Didn't want to call for the gear as with land flap we should have the gear siren blasting away - and at that indicated speed we would have got the death rattle if I called for the flaps.
Eventually I lowered the nose, descended, accelerated and then cleaned up.
Nothing was said in the debrief and I went home and reread the books to see what I should have done.
It didn't cover it - a bit like before papa india when we didn't have a procedure for a stick push.
There was also the trident 2 in nicosia that got low and slow during a training detail and firewall thrust wasn't enough to redeem the situation.
Gear and wing broke off which was repaired by BEA and reregistered as X ray Mike.
So yes - low and slow a Trident doesn't have a lot - if any - spare thrust.
(then there was the T3 at madrid........)