Cruise TIT was indeed reduced from 1010 to 985 in the 70s,
SS (Hi. How are you, by the way!). 932 was not used operationally. That must have been a later thing, as per
CG's post. We had a couple of in-flight turbine failures and found some of the other hot-ends were none too pretty either. I don't seem to recall any traumas with the reduced setting. It was simply adopted and the perf pages came along in due time. It only cost about 15 KTAS in a typical cruise, but upped the turbine life by a few thousand hours, and improved the range - a reasonable fix I think.
The second one was on a LYE-AKT (Dick Barton, I think), possibly in 74. When they throttled back at TOD, the No3 turbine came out the back and bits of it jammed the elevator. There was a fairly concerned period of descent without pitch control until they decided to apply brute force and managed to free it. 985 followed shortly afterwards!
It seems strange that, given the extended development time on the J, and the history of the K, that the MCP setting was not fully optimised by the time of RtoS. I am ever less impressed by those responsible for the test programme than I am by the aircraft itself. I'm quite sure that the J will prove a worthy successor once the professionals on 30 & 24 have shaken the bugs out of it
