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BAe ATP. What was wrong with it?

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BAe ATP. What was wrong with it?

Old 1st May 2017, 07:27
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BAe ATP. What was wrong with it?

I am an avid aviation enthusiast, but not connected with the industry at all. When BAe had the 748 in production, I used to see them regularly,out on test high above my home.
But the ATP was far less frequent, and in subsequent years always seemed to attract unfavourable comments from people inside the aviation community.
Was the ATP not fit for purpose, and if so, on what grounds?
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Old 1st May 2017, 10:00
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I believe in some quarters ATP stood for "Another Technical Problem". I seem to remember issues with the undercarriage but doubtless people with a more intimate knowledge will be along shortly. I only flew on it once, as SLF, and I must say it seemed to be an improvement over the 748.
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Old 1st May 2017, 10:42
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The 748 was a product of foresight on the part of Avro who could see a gap in the market when piston types were aging fast, Fokker saw the same opportunity and produced the F27 and both types were pretty successful.


The ATP was conceived as an update of the 748 but BAe tried too hard to make it 'advanced' or as a BAe trainer told me "they took the 748 and designed all the simplicity out of it". The electrical wiring caused many problems and airframe or prop de ice also caused lots of delays. The long noseleg option was supposed to make it possible to operate from airbridges but that was little used in service. It had a not-quite-FADEC engine control systems and a rudder boost system which were also problematic. I had 15 years of trying to maintain them and it was a laugh a minute!
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Old 1st May 2017, 12:00
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One problem was it abysmal rate of climb compared with the '748. When writing the 'noise abatement' departure procedures for Farnborough runway 24, I had to make special allowance for the ATP, specifying 'straight ahead 2nm or 1,400ft (for the ATP) whichever comes first' as the most vociferous noise complainers live in Church Crookham, west south west of the airport. I also had to write a special procedure for visual approaches to runway 06 for it as if we got a complaint, it was about the ATP - not that I ever found it any noisier than turbofan aircraft - from someone who apparently worked for BAe at Farnborough! (so I was told).
BAe even tried to 'disguise' it one Farnborough Airshow by exhibiting it as the 'Jetstream 61' even though it had no relationship with the J31 and J41.
We saw 'Jetstream 61' on all the paperwork and looked forward eagerly to a new aircraft which up to then had been secret and when it arrived it was just an ATP with 'Jetstream 61' painted on the side!!

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Old 1st May 2017, 12:01
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And then it became the Jetstream 61
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Old 1st May 2017, 12:04
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Originally Posted by Harry Wayfarers
And then it became the Jetstream 61
Great minds think alike Harry!!
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Old 1st May 2017, 12:14
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I have to confess to being an F27 fan (6,000 hours) and always considered the F27 and 748 to be comparably good aircraft. Although I never flew either of their successors, it always puzzled me that Fokker got it right with the F50, whereas the ATP (??)
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Old 1st May 2017, 12:17
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Flew many hours in the company ATP (80p or skoda ) as SLF between farnborough and warton circa 2000 -2001 and I actually quite liked flying in it - certainly preferred it to the alternative hired in Titan ATR (except the ATR had some lovely trolley dollies ).
As others have posted - they were not built for maintenance,quite usual for british aircraft designs of course - the british designers never seemed to think of making aircraft easy to work on.
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Old 1st May 2017, 13:33
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I second Ron's remarks, probably making me the shorter, fatter ron. I was a frequent flyer on those same routes, probably on the same flights, typically 2 return trips per week (sometimes more). It had replaced a 29 seat Jetstream 41 (uncomfortable and poor despatch reliability) which had itself replaced a pair of Jetstream 31s (a comfortable 12-seater and a less comfortable 18 seater).

Being very much a fatteron the seats could be a little constraining, but were tolerable for the 45-minute (IIRC) flight, and the aeroplane had a nice-enough ride. It was no less or more comfortable than the 146 which replaced it, and was much MORE comfortable than the execrable Embraer 145 which has since replaced the 146. The 145 was (I suspect) only designed to carry consignments of deaf dwarfs to the battles of middle earth, and only then under general aesthetic. Flying in the 145 is preferable to having your arms and legs chewed off by zombies, but only marginally.

I'm told that as a commercial proposition one of it's main problems is that the wing was "half a frame out", which is to say that in its final form the CG came out wrong. It needed either to move the wing half a frame (not possible because there was nothing to mount it on) or increase the size of the tailplane (not affordable). As a result it needed to carry nose ballast when empty, and was always loaded from the front to the back. In our use if the aeroplane was flying half full then the cabin crew would fold forward the seat backs of the rearmost third of the seats before boarding the pax. There are many tales of regular runs like taking children from the channel islands to/from boarding schools on the mainland at the beginning/end of term where you could more or less guarantee one leg would be empty, so at the end of term they'd carry a standard bit of ballast which they'd offload and leave at the airport, ready to pick up again on the return flight at the beginning of the next term. That sort of CG sensitivity just adds the extra "faffing factor" which operators hate.

Do I remember that BIA operated a bunch of them, or did I make that up?

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Old 1st May 2017, 17:14
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BIA?

Are you thinking of BWA (British World), formerly British Air Ferries?
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Old 1st May 2017, 17:26
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Or BA, who operated 17 of them at various times.
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Old 1st May 2017, 17:32
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More or less from the horse's mouth...

.....from someone who attended the ATP product support regular meetings as a participant.
One of the very regular complaints was the venting from the toilet into the flight deck. One captain said he could always tell from shortly after t/o, who had had an Indian in GLA the night before. After several tries the anwer was to warm the vent pipe from the holding tank in the loo to the outlet valve on the skin. No thermostat was involved and if the transit was longish you ended up with a 3 foot pipe full of boiling crap.
One of the others was as a result of the fuelage being longer, in that the spacing between the ribs was longer and the vibration of the control runs passing through the grommets in the ribs was quite different/severe and chewed through the grommets pretty quickly and then into the ribs.....
He used to come in from these meetings demanding a beer or several and sentences began with "I don't F*****g believe what the company is trying to do....."
On several occasions I was privy to watching (as an outsider) BAe senior management operating with their colleagues and I could not believe the way they treated their subordinates. A firm smack in the mouth might have been beneficial for several of them.
So when MRA4 went tu I wasn't surprised.

The Ancient Mariner
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Old 1st May 2017, 22:01
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There were a range of competing larger twin turboprops which came out in the 1980s-90s, most didn't succeed. There was a belief that because of seat-mile costs airlines would prefer them to jets. That hadn't happened with the Vanguard 30 years before and it wasn't going to happen now.

The thing that really killed it for all the turboprops was the development of the Embraer and Canadair regional jets, both from non-established manufacturers in the sector so that nobody took them seriously until it was too late. Even those who bought the turbos moved on quite quickly, and the ATP was particularly afflicted by this.


What this has to do with poor aspects of a type like the ATP is they see any future market going, and stop the product improvement that would have addressed a number of the issues.


It didn't help that the only three mainstream purchasers of the type were BA, British Midland (plus their offshoots of the time) and United, all of whom moved on from the turbo market. BA actually stayed with the type longer than some give credit for, from 1988 they lasted for 15 years or more.

BAe seem to have had a notably poor management of the programme, having built about 60 of them at Woodford they then moved production to Prestwick, from where just one was sold, the last one to fly was scrapped unsold, and a third abandoned part-completed. That really is a sign of management not having a clue. The ones with British World (mentioned above) and some others were effectively given away at residual sale price, having hung around as white-tails, the last of the Woodford production, for some years after production was abandoned. How you can decide to set up another production line when you can't sell your existing output just about sums it up.
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Old 1st May 2017, 22:41
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Originally Posted by WHBM
There were a range of competing larger twin turboprops which came out in the 1980s-90s, most didn't succeed. There was a belief that because of seat-mile costs airlines would prefer them to jets. That hadn't happened with the Vanguard 30 years before and it wasn't going to happen now.

The thing that really killed it for all the turboprops
was the development of the Embraer and Canadair regional jets, both from non-established manufacturers in the sector so that nobody took them seriously until it was too late. Even those who bought the turbos moved on quite quickly, and the ATP was particularly afflicted by this.
I think that's a bit of an oversimplification. Thirty years on, both the Dash 8 and ATR family are doing OK, with 2,500 or so sales between them, whereas the original 50-seat regional jets (Canadair RJ100, Embraer ERJs) did indeed prove uneconomic and, ultimately, unattractive to the airlines until replaced by stretched variants or new developments such as the E-jets.

But you are correct in your assessment that, compared to its contemporaries, the ATP was a dog.
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Old 2nd May 2017, 05:31
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Maybe barry lloyd would like to contribute. Apparently at one time he was an ATP salesman.
Poor sod.
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Old 2nd May 2017, 07:09
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Not a salesman, but a driver in its later (white van) years. Where to begin?

134brat said "they designed the simplicity out of it" and that's certainly how it seemed in the pointy end. It felt like more than an update of the 748 (jump seated on one, once) and a long way from a clean sheet design.

Designed to be as quiet and fuel efficient as possible when the world wanted quick regional jets. Low wing design put limits on prop size, and a structure seemingly made from iron girders - good for strength, bad for payload.

First gen efis, which is good, but bespoke CRT's, and some strange electronic checklist (almost ECAM-lite) that never quite worked. Oh and every time a screen blew (almost a monthly event at one point) smiths had to make you another from scratch. Cockpit a strange mix of glass and parts robbed from the spares bin. Comm box from a Victor bomber, park brake from the comet, pressurisation controller from the vanguard, that required constant tweaking if you didn't want to blow your eardrums out.

Engine out climb was, quite frankly, terrifying. Legal, but only just. Enough time to make a cuppa while accelerating to flap retraction. 2 engines, well, you'd get turned out of the way of pretty much everything else on the airway, you were so slow. 240kt TAS in the cruise, if you were lucky.

Freighter had a sliding door (like a transit van) which would freeze shut if there was any moisture in a 30mi radius. To unfreeze it? Wait for spring...

Not enough elevator authority for flap 29 landings, meant you would have to trim in the flare. Never seen that before. Or since.

If you de-iced with (iirc) type 2 fluid, there was a real chance the tail would be aerodynamically blanked, meaning you wouldn't be able to rotate until something like Vr + 40.

Oh and everything that needs replacing was "fettle to fit". Using about 3 different size spanners (Imperial, Metric and Whitworth apparently).

not sure what BAe were thinking when they put this together. Surely a clean sheet design, or a "quick and dirty" re engine of the 748 would have been a better option? We might just have kept civil airliner production in the uk if that was the case. But, given BAe's record at project management, maybe not.

At least "Robbie" Robinson loved it. I liked it, it was my first type, but I was in no illusions as to its shortcomings.
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Old 2nd May 2017, 07:41
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Originally Posted by thetimesreader84
2 engines, well, you'd get turned out of the way of pretty much everything else on the airway, you were so slow. 240kt TAS in the cruise, if you were lucky.
I think it was in Propliner magazine where a writer had managed to get a flight deck ride in one of the very last Viscounts around, and found they were slowly overhauling a new ATP as they went along !
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Old 2nd May 2017, 08:09
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I worked for a turboprop cargo operator when BAe (I think it was) came along with a video presentation in hope to persuade us to buy some ATP freighters.

Great video except that when they started to load it the sun was shining thru one set of side windows and by the time they'd finished loading it shining thru the opposite set of side windows.
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Old 2nd May 2017, 08:21
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Viewed from Hatfield we regarded the 748 as having the field performance criteria we needed for our 146 and it set us a target for seat-mile costs. The ATP (Ancient Technology Preserved) seemed to us to offer no advantage over anything.
Moving the ATP production to Prestwick was part of the property-value-led shambles that closed a purpose-built production building at Hatfield and moved its 146 final assembly to add it to that being undertaken in the building at Woodford which was originally built for production of the Avro Manchester.
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Old 2nd May 2017, 08:22
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In fairness I think it found a niche in cargo, albeit one that is diminishing. Just about big enough to take ULDs, if that's your thing (Either Lower Deck Airliners, or bespoke) and just about small enough to bulk load (although it would take maybe 90 minutes to completely fill it). Freight doesn't care if it's noisy, or slow, or bounces around in the clouds. All that matters is that it gets there on time...

Which it would, but then the cargo door would feeeze shut, and that was that.
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