Originally Posted by
Gumpied
[The airstairs] As an aside I believe they were designed by the same guy as designed the HP Victor undercarriage and if you've ever watched that sequence you'll understand the Airstairs.
Didn't know of this guy, but a number of the key team who worked on the Tristar design in the late 1960s came from the UK manufacturing industry, and their departure for Burbank was noted and commented on as one of the key aspects of the "brain drain" that was sometimes in the news at the time. Both Handley Page and De Havilland were scaling back their design teams at the time. The Autoland on the Tristar is said by those who flew it, and have flown other types since, to have never been beaten for ability and accuracy, not bad for a 40 year old pre-computing design, on a type now completely out of service. The principal designers were taken from the pioneering Trident Autoland development team at Hatfield, where they had taken years to perfect it, and there was little follow-on work for them.
I did read that the Tristar Autoland was certificated for something like 40 knots crosswind, but the test pilots had been up at nearer 60 during the trials, they then just couldn't find a crosswind of that strength when it came to the certificate demonstration.