talk on the Trident airliner at Brooklands 23 march
 

next Thursday evening at brooklands weybridge surrey is a talk on the trident by expert Neil lomax

23 march 1900

info for tickets https://www.brooklandsmuseum.com/btm...ident-Airliner

Whilst the usual criticism levelled against DHA is their allegience to the Spey, thereby limiting the Trident's potential, I only recently discovered that the Spey was Boeing's original choice of engine for the 727!

However the proposed license-production deal with Allison fell-through because gov.uk declined to provide funding or permit certain technology transfer. As a result, Boeing was persuaded by its US customers to go with the JT8D, which was fatter and heavier but which had a US supply chain. And which of course eventually scaled-up to higher thrusts and left the Spey behind.

The Spey was fine for the Tridents 1 and 2, but wouldn't scale for the Trident 3. The criticism of dH is that they let BEA talk them out of the Medway engined dH 121 and instead build the ludicrously small 90 seat Trident 1 for which the Spey sufficed.

SSD is right that some of our senior management was weak-willed and as one of the clear-thinkers put it " . . . designed an internationally unwanted airliner with scaled-down engines that RR knew they could not sell elsewhere."
One of our partners in Airco was Hunting and if you remember they used the Spey when their twin-engined project became the BAC111. I think I remember Heinz Vogel telling me how redesigning it for Spey power was a classic all-nighter but I can't remember what engine it had before that.

ETA however we don't need to cover that old ground here. Go and hear about the aeroplane from someone who's involved now!

I'm going!

Bristol Siddeley BS75 apparently.

i flew on many Tridents - mostly Northeast 1e's on charter to Swans Tours out of LHR usually at weekends in summer (Med) and winter (ski)

the sun pax went to milan turin pisa rimini venice palma ibiza mahon malaga gerona barcelona alicante
in high season sometimes relief flights would depart 15 minutes after the first one
overbookings were rife

the ski flight pax for Austria were flown to ZRH and MUC
never understood why we did not go to Salzburg which was a BEA destination too and closer to the Tirol
guess a Trident would never get into INN
Italy ski pax went to MXP and Turin

123 Y pax on the One E
the range was not that brilliant with that load - i think Malaga was about the limit or Malta although Channel AW did STN-LPA with 139Y - how i do not know but apparently a Channel AW Trident holds the record for the fastest flight time from London to the Canaries of just 3 hours 15 mins

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped..._AN2388412.jpg


flew LGW-Dubrovnk once subbing for BCAL Aug 1972 as they had lost a 1-11 at CFU in a RTO.

No thread on the Trident is complete without this picture:

http://www.shockcone.co.uk/hs121/tri...es/1ecabin.jpg

Apparently some airline found it wise to put a 7-abreast seating into the forward cabin of the airliner. I can only imagine the relief of the travellers when finally being allowed off this sardine can...

Channel Airways - 140 seats

Quote from rog747:
"flew LGW-Dubrovnk once subbing for BCAL Aug 1972 as they had lost a 1-11 at CFU in a RTO."

Talking of Corfu and BCAL's 1-11 over-run into shallow water following a rejected take-off there reminds me of one of my few visits there one summer's day, at about that period (early 1970s), on a BCAL passenger charter.

I was sitting alone completing the turnround checks when we had a visit from a friendly BEA Trident first-officer, who was interested to have a look in our spacious cockpit. (I don't remember which mark of Trident he was flying.)

During our conversation he asked how limited our weight would be for the Corfu departure. Having just laboriously calculated it from the graphs (as always), I had to tell him we were limited by around 15 tonnes, leaving an RTOW of about 127 tonnes (IIRC). Not a problem for the full charter-load of pax to Gatwick, however.

The BEA guy was impressed and not a little envious, as I think they were struggling to plan a direct return to LHR. No disrespect to the Trident, of course, which would have burned far less fuel per passenger-mile than ours. Simply the luxury of operating a short-haul flight with an over-powered, long-haul aeroplane, manufactured at Brooklands.

Thanks for reminding me!
I think there was also a Bristol aeroplane project with those engines arranged round a butterfly tail.

7 abreast seating trident one E
 

i actually sat in those seats at STN when the channel trident was open for public viewing on one Sunday afternoon when it was quite new

i was 11 or 12 so not huge but i was quite a big lad and mum dad and me tried out the 4 seater row - it was actually OK!

139 Ypax IIRC

Chris
what were you flying out of CFU at 127 tonnes RTOW>? a VC10?

Tricky one ...

well yes - VC10's were used on BCAL charters to the Canaries, Nicosia and Rhodes but never knew one of them ever going into Corfu

when Northeast pranged a Trident one E at Bilbao (G-AVYD which was a w/off) the airline was short of lift and both STD and Super BA VC10's were used on Northeast holiday charters to Spain (1975)
i went to ALC on a super and AGP STD

Hi rog747,

BCAL Standard VC10 Type 1103. Wot! Not enough hints? :rolleyes: (Apologies for the thread drift.) The Type 1103 had the "Super" chord extension and wing-tip L/E droop, enabling F/L430 when light enough. One of them is the one at Brooklands, donated by the Sultan of Oman.

The "Ten" burned about 5500-6000kg/hr in the cruise at medium weights.
I imagine the Tridents would have burned not much more than half that at a similar, or slightly higher Mach?
In those days (it was August 1971, so before the fuel crisis) we were cruising at a modest M0.835 (0.86 indicated). MMO was 0.86.

From what I heard the Trident was also faster in the climb and descent than the VC10. Our VMO was only 329 kt IAS at sea-level; slightly reducing higher up.

Quote:
" VC10's were used on BCAL charters to the Canaries, Nicosia and Rhodes but never knew one of them ever going into Corfu"

Never did Rhodes or Nicosia personally, and now see I only did CFU the once. LPA and TCI (Tenerife North, as it was coded in those days) were schedules, the former also used en-route GIG. I once did a charter from BOH to TCI with 150 pax at a time when the Hurn runway was only 6000 ft...

I remember seeing a VC-10 at Hurn doing the Tenerife flight. I think it was due to a French or Spanish ATC strike and the usual 1-11 didn't have the range to take the oceanic route. ("Tango" route ??)
The 1-11 only had 119 seats and usually tech stopped outbound and sometimes inbound as well.

thanks for that!

i worked for horizon holidays around that time and they were a big BUA customer for their charters (then Cale//BUA) and recall the ops board showing VC10's we had going to the slightly further afield and to the posher destinations as you too also recall but Corfu was def a new one to me! cheers

that would have been for Bath Travel Palmair i assume

One must understand that in 1960. when the Trident was being designed, 90 seats was not small, but large, for BEA European services, these had commonly low load factors (60-70%) as it was with the Viscount which preceded them on many routes. The bigger Vanguard had sold on the basis of seat-mile costs, but the bums on seats to cover all those Vanguard seats just weren't there except on a few domestic trunk routes (which the Trident, initially, was not expected to cover).

The standard aircraft of the era for many of the BEA competitors into London was the Caravelle, which had less than 90 seats. With the pooling arrangements of the era with most other European flag carriers, the more seats your aircraft had, the less frequency you could do, needing to maintain a strict seating balance.