BEA Trident London - Moscow 1971
 

I notice from the BOAC 1971 timetable that there was a Trident Service (BE 670) operated by BEA from Heathrow T1 to Moscow (I assume Sheremetyevo-2) 3X weekly (Otherwise BOAC 707).

BOAC 1971 Timetable London-Moscow Section

Was this a Trident 3B, and was it operating at the limits of its range?

Just curious that a Trident operated this route!

Thanks.

More likely a T2E - they operated London-Moscow from 1968 onwards.

Certainly Trident 2E - checking my fathers log books - always a 2 from in his case from Feb 1970 through to Oct 1974. Flight time around 3:20 outbound and 3:40 return - there and back in a day as the logistics of crew hotels etc were horrendous. I recall that the routing was tightly prescribed to ensure they were kept away from certain installations. Certainly one of the longer flights but the Tridents 2's used to do Tel Aviv non stop with an outbound leg of around 4:30 and return legs up to 5:05. Interestingly when he switched to TriStars the Tel Aviv flights were always 15 - 20 minutes longer as not much could keep up with the Trident certainly before they were restricted to M0.8 in Oct 1973.

Tel Aviv scheduled as non stop in T2 but remember a couple of tech stops in Geneva inbound due adverse winds!

I always laugh about the T3 - designed to be longer with a greater capacity until someone realised it couldn't get off the ground! So they put in a fourth mini-engine with an on/off switch (!). It basiclly has two settings; full power for take-off and "off"! Talk about Heath Robinson!!

Now that is a surprise... always thought the Tridents were short(ish)-range. Many thanks for the very interesting input.

Didn't BEA get as "far" as Cairo too?

It was worse than that; quite a sad saga that explains quite a lot about why we Brits weren't very good at selling aeroplanes outside UK.

In the beginning (of this saga) Hawker Siddeley had on the drawing board the HS121. It was about T3 sized, and planned to use three RR Medway engines. It might have been a viable competitor to the later B727, taking the market that went to that aeroplane.

But BEA said "it's far too big. Make it titchy and we'll buy some". So they did, the ludicrously undersized T1. Later they upgraded that to the T2 at BEA's request, about the limit for Speys (the Medway was never produced once the HS 121 was ditched).

Eventually BEA woke up to the size of aeroplane they should have bought in the first in the first place, and asked HS to make the T2 bigger yet.

So they stretched the T2 and added the RB162 boost engine, a compact turbojet that had been developed as one of many lift engines for vertical lift in the days before the brilliant Harrier defined that technology.

So the T3 was an abomination. Four engines (so not a TRIdent anymore?), five if you include the APU.

Now if BEA had simply ordered the original HS121 in the first place.... Or if HS had stuck to their guns and marketed their 121 internationally despite BEA.....

[QUOTE][Didn't BEA get as "far" as Cairo too?/QUOTE]

Not on Tridents at least between 1966 and 1974 from my fathers records.

His only Cairo flights were whilst training Cyprus Airways crews on their Viscount 800's which were at least initially loaned from BEA, painted in a composite livery and had at least some local cabin crew. G-AOYK being used for the proving flights to and from Nicosia in around 1:45 in October 1965.

Maybe others might know if any of the BEA Comet 4's ever went to Cairo.

Tridents only ever had three engines............

From the BOAC timetable 1971 again:

Cairo Page 1971 BOAC Timetable

Seems to be a VC-10 at least in the later BOAC days, like Moscow I am sure they would include BEA flights in the timetable for any BOAC routes.

Great story, but the realisation came as soon as the T2E had flown that the Spey 512 didn't have any growth potential that would allow 3 of them to power a stretch.

Tridents, and indeed Comets before them, went to all the eastern Med points, most commonly through Nicosia in Cyprus, also served nonstop by both types (Tel Aviv is actually visible on the horizon when you are at altitude over Cyprus). BEA had a longstanding codeshare agreement with Cyprus Airways, who didn't have their own aircraft in the 1960s, on this. The Comets got to Beirut, Cairo, and for a while further, to Damascus, Kuwait, Bahrain and Doha, which are the farthest destinations served by BEA aircraft and crews. I think this 1961 timetable has BEA Comets to all the points mentioned.


http://www.timetableimages.com/ttima...61/be61-17.jpg

and no, BOAC, despite showing many other partners, only sparingly included any such flights in their timetables - and in return BEA never showed BOAC ones in theirs.

Separately to this, BEA in the 1960s provided two Viscount 800s to Cyprus Airways, which did their local regional flights. I believe the BEA square logo in the cheatline (but not the big red one on the fin) was replaced by a CY logo for the duration, which for each of the two aircraft typically lasted for about 3 months before coming back to Heathrow for a check and being replaced.

Once the Comets had gone a Trident was all BEA had for Moscow, loads could be notably thin at times and there are stories of them being down to single figures in winter. Aeroflot ran Tupolev 104s on the route, changing over to Ilyushin 62s around 1970. It was almost unknown for Soviet nationals to be on the BEA flight, despite each only operating on a few days a week. The BOAC 707 Moscow flights were a separate operation through to Tokyo, which started in 1971, the "Russiaway to Japan" route, for which they had to buy two new and specially equipped 707s actually after they started taking delivery of 747s - which were not permitted on the Siberia route for many years afterwards.

I read an interesting novel in about 1971 involving Tridents going to Moscow.
The story went the USSR managed to secrete an imitation nuclear device in the Houses of Parliament and challenged the British government to see if they could do something similar.
A plot was devised whereby the Moscow bound Trident would take off from Heathrow and would be stealthily joined by a Buccaneer carrying an imitation nuclear weapon. They would fly in close formation so as to present only one blip on radar, the Trident would somehow break off from the Buccaneer and land elsewhere (Copenhagen I think) and the Bucc would carry on on the flight planned route to deliver its payload in Red Square.
I don't remember the name of the book or who wrote it I'm afraid and some of the detail may be wrong, but in those days it was an intriguing tale!

I remember flying Tel-Aviv to Heathrow in 1974 in a T2. As I recall it was a full load on a sweltering hot day...and from a backwards-facing seat it felt like I was watching those L/E droops struggling over the Med for ages before we got cleaned up and gained a bit of altitude. Papa India was still a recent memory so my interest in such details might be forgiven.

Incidentally, as a member of the Trident nostalgia club, I very much enjoy Blind Pew's contributions on this and related subjects. More please!

Goofer

On a memorable trip to Israel with a BEA mate on an ID90 in about 72-73, when the T2 stopped at the terminal there was a PA announcement instructing everyone to remain seated. A couple of scowling characters with Uzis came on board, walked up and down the aisle scrutinizing everyone before stopping at our seat and gesturing for us to follow them down the steps, where we were given the third-degree (thankfully no rubber gloves were involved) before they politely wished us a pleasant stay in Israel.

Slats on the T2; only the T1C had droop leading-edges.

Definitely Trident 2E's flew to Moscow and also as far as Tel Aviv. The T3 lacked the range; I believe Athens was the furthest a T3 flew. The T3 would venture into Libya via Malta as well as Tunis, Casablanca. I am the proud owner of a T3 (G-AWZI), all be it just the nose section (restored in her BEA colours and on display at the FAST Museum, Farnborough airport); over the years I have built up a log of some of her flights during her career with BEA/BA 1971-1985. The information taken from visiting Trident pilots and their log books. It does make a fascinating reading.

I first flew Moscow on the T2 in 1972. There was what you might call a non cooperation pact between the corporations in the BEA management created an open hostile atmosphere towards BOAC; probably they rightly believed that the government would get BOAC to sort us out. That's the reason behind the timetables. (BEA wouldn't give concessionary flights to BOAC).
This was a time when the BEA guys were flying through thunderstorms in the Berlin corridors because of the risk of being shot down. We used to look out for Russian fighters but I never heard of one being seen - the closest I ever came to anything exciting was seeing a ground to ground missile tracking low level across Germany at night.
We carried Helsinki alternate fuel and there were occasions of tech stopping but probably because of take off weight restrictions. Interestingly BEA could operate into airfields that were closed to Swissair because of runway contamination - even more puzzling because the Munich disaster happened due to contamination and BEA had ignored two accidents.
One would have thought that a carrier who operated most winter days onto ice or slush covered runways would know better ;-)

The approach was different because the charts showed right angled tight turns and you basically made your own intercepts...sometimes going straight through the centre line and then turning back to intercept the ILS.

Fuel;
It wasn't until recently that I understood the fuel calculation policy in BEA...this has relevance to the tech stopping. Often the fuel was calculated at MTOW whatever the TOW and included contingency fuel. The fuel score was calculated on fuel burnt and didn't take into consideration of lower consumption at lighter weight - so was unduly pessimistic.
There was some other regulation that we had to arrive at destination with alternate fuel and 30mins holding; although a couple of management pilots would ignore this - the mentality carried on and nearly lead to the loss of a droop snoop and a 747.

Flying out of Nicosia I tech stopped in Munich or Frankfurt whilst Cyprus airways T2s steamed past us at high speed and flew direct.
Cyprus Airways was basically a BEA operation (AerLingus was also partly owned by BEA) except they had polished wings whilst we had the pealing red ones - this was banded around by our training department as to why they could do LHR in one hit.
In reality I think they understood the fuel policy better and minimum drag/ specific fuel consumption.
One has to understand that aviation knowledge still isn't cut and dried. A former colleague told me that when he went onto Concorde in the 80s they didn't understand how to operate her properly, that minimum drag was around 400 knots and they had been flying her around too slowly with engine failures.
I can understand there is more than a grain of truth in that as I thought I was going to loose the roof from my thatched cottage near Newbury one stormy night after an engine went into reverse upon rotation out of LHR. - The crew managed to nurse her to 3,000 ft over the Bristol Channel.

Similarly I made a contribution to gliding safety 15 years ago as winching wasn't being taught properly and only a month ago I questioned the control design on my latest paraglider (after a few hours of flying close to mountains and checking the performance).There are just so many variables in aviation.

So on the Nicosia and Tel Aviv some of the captains would get us wallowing along at M.8 instead of M.86 which gave a distinct lower nose attitude and hence, along with Ram recovery factor, a better SFC.

Tel Aviv.
Last week a colleague posted two horrific incidents on Tridents; the latter lead to an immediate visit to management and a conversion course onto the Transavia 737.
Very few pilots take into consideration Temp inversions. I nearly crashed into the Schwarzwald flying a MD80 because of the performance loss and windshear.

From Tel Aviv we had to cross the coast above 1,000 ft because of the military protecting the coast line. In summer it was impossible.
My colleague had got airborne (just) and at 200 ft they hit a strong inversion (and probably a tail wind).
The aircraft stopped climbing and faced with the looming Hilton and Sheraton hotels they fire walled the throttles - which didn't make an awful lot of difference on the Spey because of the fuel control unit except they over temperatured them and had to be changed.
They flew between the hotels and managed to eventually accelerate over the sea.

What had been demonstrated at Madrid a few years before after a T3 diversion following an engine failure out of Malaga was to lower the nose - clean up and accelerate to 230 - 260 knots and the Trident will climb and handle quite nicely.
(Madrid ATC lined up an Iberia aircraft on short finals - typical crap from some of the highest paid controllers).

I don't know the exact min drag speed as no one IIRC ever talked about it and climb performance is dependent on ram recovery factor as well but in descent the bird seemed to fly forever around 250knots.

On a political note I was never worried about Moscow as one forgets that without the Russians the Germans would have won the war.
From the 60s the corporations recruited civil pilots as "military" along with women, gays and Johnny Foreigner don't make good crew members. I was one of the Hamble "mafia" as a Sleazy Jet pilot called us.

It wasn't until I flew with ex post war RAF and Luftwaffe pilots that I realised that this was horse s@@t; Importantly they also told me that whilst they trained to fight the Russians the security briefing was that WW3 would be between Europe and USA.
Whilst America had the boom times in the 50s we still had rationing until 1953 (have my book of stamps still).
My father was a translator for de Gaulle ...he told me that Churchill and de Gaulle betrayed the resistance to the Nazis so that France would remain fascist (the files are in the national archives at Kew but restricted for 100years).
Whilst politically naive what the Troika gets up to along with Snowden's release on Clinton/Sarkosy/Libya and the latest Panama files probably shows that Russia was never a real threat and just a bogey man just as all Muslims apparently are.
Happy days.

This sort of sounds like "Flight of the Bat". In that story the Soviets dropped a V-2 type missile sans warhead on to somewhere in London - it may have been Hyde Park - and the U.K government then decided to do the same to let the Soviets know that we could do something similar.
The Bat was an obviously renamed TSR2. It (the Bat) took off for Moscow, the noise of the night take off being disguised by a Lightning lifting off with it and then, after an AAR from a Valiant it dropped it's inert payload into Red Square. I believe the book came out about 1965.
It wasn't a very good book, I've no idea who the author was.

A quick Google shows this as an option:
http://pictures.abebooks.com/BOOKSFR...5578754509.jpg