Lockheed Martin - this is for you - L-1011 New Generation

[stilton]

Well said, as a piece of trivia the Tristar was the only commercial transport not made by them that was openly admired by Boeing.

[oldchina]

thermostat

"Re-engine and upgrade to glass, this would be the queen of the skies".

The one thing you can be sure of with pilots is that they have no clue about operating economics. This upgrade would give the 1011 a level of technology and efficiency well inferior to the A300-600: itself a 25 year-old design!

[hawker750]

Quote: Not one L-1011 loss was due to the aircraft design.

I would argue that the everglades was down to aircraft design though I admit other aircraft had this similar design stupidity

[hawker750]

glhcarl
quote: What a dirty rotten shame, you actually had to do your job for 4 whole hours!

I can only assume you are a failed pilot as you seem to have a big chip. I never said I was complaining about hand flying for 4 hours, infact, quite the reverse. I was simply commenting on how a such a superbly designed aircraft with triplex autopilot can have so many system failures at the same time. Yes of course taking all power off the aircraft for 20 seconds cured all the faults, but if my memory serves me well, it did say in small print on page 121 para 6.2.1.b) of the maintenance manual that it was not recommended to do this proceedure in flight. But of course I may be wrong.

[Graybeard]

I was told EAL-401 AP tripped off because the long time chief pilot of TWA had insisted during the design that the AP kick off at a much lower CW force than LCC wanted.

He was also the guy who insisted on a 500' full scale radalt indicator. The TW 727 that hit a hill on approach to Washington in 1975 due to lack of situational awareness that would have been aided by the industry standard 2500' radalt indicator, was the accident that brought the mandate for GPWS.

All the overhead switches on TW planes back in that era were backwards from other airlines. Second tier operators, who later had those planes in mixed fleets, had their hands full.

That chief pilot had an overbearing personality, and the authority to get his way. Vendors gave him special coddling in his travels. Best not to go into that here.

In the day of the electromaniacal (electromechanical) flight directors, there seemed to be a version for the chief pilot of every major airline. Between Bendix, Collins and Sperry, there must have been near 200 versions.

GB

[aterpster]

Graybeard:

I was told EAL-401 AP tripped off because the long time chief pilot of TWA had insisted during the design that the AP kick off at a much lower CW force than LCC wanted.

He was also the guy who insisted on a 500' full scale radalt indicator. The TW 727 that hit a hill on approach to Washington in 1975 due to lack of situational awareness that would have been aided by the industry standard 2500' radalt indicator, was the accident that brought the mandate for GPWS.

All the overhead switches on TW planes back in that era were backwards from other airlines. Second tier operators, who later had those planes in mixed fleets, had their hands full.

That chief pilot had an overbearing personality, and the authority to get his way. Vendors gave him special coddling in his travels. Best not to go into that here.

His initials were Gordie Granger.

I was a pilot there. We tried in vain to get the company to use the full 2,500' capability of the RA before TWA 514 happened (12-01-1974). No luck, their response was it is for CAT II, not altitude awareness.

BTW, Gordie wasn't the chief pilot, he was the director of safety or some B.S. title like that. The chief pilot was Ed Frankum. He and Gordie were like two peas in a pod.

The backwards switch deal died with the L-1011 and B-767. So did the 500 foot RA readouts. Lockheed and Boeing were tired of playing with Gordie by that time.

One summer, when I was on the 727, we had a 727-200 exchange with National for few birds. We were tried by bulletin. We had to be careful with those standard Boeing switches.

Gordie could have been responsible for the light (15 pounds) of forward pressure on the control column to kick the autoflight from command to CWS. But, Lockheed took the hit on the EAL swamp crash because of the lack of an audible warning. (Where were the FAA cert folks on that one?)

[DozyWannabe]

Originally Posted by aterpster

Gordie could have been responsible for the light (15 pounds) of forward pressure on the control column to kick the autoflight from command to CWS. But, Lockheed took the hit on the EAL swamp crash because of the lack of an audible warning. (Where were the FAA cert folks on that one?)

If I recall correctly, it wasn't that it was 15lbs pressure so much as they'd calibrated the RHS yoke to 15lbs and the LHS yoke to 20lbs. What made it more insidious was that when the computers were mismatched in this way, the LHS "ALT HOLD" annunciator would go out when 15lbs pressure was applied, but the RHS one would not.

There was an audible warning that the aircraft was departing from assigned altitude, but it only went off at the FE's station and unfortunately the FE at the time was in the nose-wheel bay trying to check the indices.

[glhcarl]

I can only assume you are a failed pilot as you seem to have a big chip. I never said I was complaining about hand flying for 4 hours, infact, quite the reverse. I was simply commenting on how a such a superbly designed aircraft with triplex autopilot can have so many system failures at the same time. Yes of course taking all power off the aircraft for 20 seconds cured all the faults, but if my memory serves me well, it did say in small print on page 121 para 6.2.1.b) of the maintenance manual that it was not recommended to do this proceedure in flight. But of course I may be wrong.

The L-1011 has put food on my the table of me and my family for the last 42 years. I get a little up set when people that have little or no actual experience on or around the TriStar saying things that are simply not true!

Example:

Control wires ran along the side (not under the floor)

The L-1011 flight control cable run throught the cabin floor beams, under the cabin floor!

I started working on the L-1011 when s/n 1001 had no wings. I retired seventeen years after the last one was delivered. For over 20 years I supported them, assisting the airline maintenance and flight crews fix problems that they could not fix themselves.

Do I know everything about the L-1011, NO, but when I see someone making statments that are simply incorrect and I know what is correct I will continue to point it out.

If you look back through the PPRuNe archives you will see many times when I had to call 411A (may he RIP) on things he got wrong!

[aterpster]

DozyWannabe:

There was an audible warning that the aircraft was departing from assigned altitude, but it only went off at the FE's station and unfortunately the FE at the time was in the nose-wheel bay trying to check the indices.

Airlines were able to order some differences on the L-1011, although not like Boeing's era of th 707/727.

EAL and TWA agreed to order the same L-1011 configuration because the plan was for them to use some of ours in the winter and visa versa in the summer. The only difference that I recall from flying the EAL birds on swap (or whatever it was called) was our L-1011 had to radar displays, one on each side of the instrument panel. EAL had only one display in the center. I thought we had a audible alert for inadvertant altitude departure that the pilots could hear, but I never got there. So, maybe it was just for the F/E.

[aterpster]

Back to Gordie Granger (RIP):

He did some good things at TWA, too. I don't know whether they offset the other stuff. One really good thing he did for our 727s has to have the emergency power switch on the overhead panel instead of on the F/E panel. In this way all three of us could reach it.

I believe a UAL crew would have dearly loved to have had that switch on the overhead.

[DozyWannabe]

@aterpster

Yeah, I remember reading that (I read John G Fuller's book on Flight 401 when I was a teenager, and when the NTSB put their archive online for the first time I looked it up). What they refer to as the "C-chord chime" (departure from assigned altitude warning) was at the time only a standard fit to the FE's console, and IIRC, one of the NTSB's recommendations after the fact was that the signal also be sent to the headset bus - I also seem to recall reading that they did implment that change.

The placement of the control cables through the floor was less of an issue in the L-1011 IIRC because the L-1011 used plug doors for the cargo hold, unlike the 747 and DC-10 which used outward-opening doors - a different engineering problem entirely. I wonder if that led to the shortfall in payload that plagued the L-1011.

At any rate this is a lovely trip down airliner memory lane, but the original post is wishful thinking. The L-1011 was a lovely design in her day and in many ways still a pioneer, but she's fundamentally forty years old now - there have been too many advances in airframe design since to make a return worthwhile.

[glhcarl]

IIRC because the L-1011 used plug doors for the cargo hold, unlike the 747 and DC-10 which used outward-opening doors

Another example:

All three L-1011 cargo doors (C-1, C-2 and C-3) opened outward!

The C-1A cargo door (used on all -500's, all BA -200's and the two CX -1's obtained from Court Lines) was almost identical to the forward cargo door of the 747, also opened outboard!

[DozyWannabe]

@glhcarl - Hence the IIRC (if I recall correctly). Fuller's book stated that and I'd never heard otherwise, so I consider myself corrected.

[stilton]

You can hardly blame the Everglades crash on the L1011.



Two Pilots were not watching the store and allowed the Aircraft to fly into the ground, simple as that.



Its no design caused accident record stands.

[Graybeard]

EAL401 can be argued as an early version of too much reliance on automatics. However, the far less automated SAS DC-8 that hit the water on approach to LAX one night was almost the same. Nobody was flying.

The Area Nav equipped ANZ DC-10 that hit Mt. Erebus was also rooted in unfounded reliance on automatics. The system had never let them down before. It was beyond their comprehension that a route coder would change the lat/lon of a waypoint without advising the crew.

GB

[DozyWannabe]

Originally Posted by Graybeard

EAL401 can be argued as an early version of too much reliance on automatics. However, the far less automated SAS DC-8 that hit the water on approach to LAX one night was almost the same. Nobody was flying.

Yeah. I'd say what we're looking at with EAL401 was an early demonstration of why CRM is fundamentally necessary, although in their case there was a lot of "there but for the grace of..." (get-home-itis just before the holidays) and more than a little old-fashioned rotten luck (warning going off with FE in the hell-hole, mismatched computers - not to mention the nose gear light burning out at that precise moment in time).

The Area Nav equipped ANZ DC-10 that hit Mt. Erebus was also rooted in unfounded reliance on automatics. The system had never let them down before. It was beyond their comprehension that a route coder would change the lat/lon of a waypoint without advising the crew.

Well, there was a lot more to that one, with ANZ routinely flouting their own regulations for two years prior to the accident, with the pilots being used to flying a route that had been incorrectly programmed in the INS for a year prior. Basically the Chief Navigator incorrectly entered the waypoint when the computers first arrived, and then corrected the waypoint to match ANZ's documentation without telling anyone the night before the flight. In that time the pilots had become used to flying the "incorrect" route (which in fact more closely aligned with the military route almost all other aircraft took around McMurdo Sound), and so the lore of the crew room was that the "incorrect" route, which did not overfly Erebus directly, was the route they would take. The final piece of that puzzle was the whiteout conditions presenting a false horizon.

I had a long debate with an ex-ANZ pilot on here over the crew's responsibility versus that of the airline - those who know me from the AF447 thread may be surprised that I was arguing the crew were not at fault, and that the change in INS co-ordinates not communicated to the pilots was the overriding cause. He argued that the crew should have never relied on the INS to the degree they did, and should not have flown so low - despite that being considered normal procedure at the time.

[Spooky 2]

Truly a facinating thread and it's to bad 411A isn't around to enjoy it.

My recollection of the up/aft and off switches that dominated TWA and Lufthansa Boeing aircraft of that time was from spending a copius amount of time in some old Lufthansa 727-100's which had a few other unusual items as I recall. The Lufthansa spec probably comes from the early days when TWA was providing technical assistance to Luftansa after they restarted operation in the early fifties after the end of WWll. I suspect that if one could look, they would find that the Constellations of these two airlines had a lot in common as this where first technical assistance occured in both the 1049 and 1649 airliners.

I was lucky enough to have flown both the DC10 and L1011 having about 4000 hours in each type as PIC. To me from a purely pilots point of view, the L1011 was a superior airplane to the DC10.

[overun]

Mr Optimistic.

Thankyou, you are plainly a gentleman.

[tonytales]

There were several things that hobbled L-1011 sale. The first was the decision to limit engine choices to one manufacturer. It was physically the smallest of the three big fan engines and when Rolls stumbled they couldn't fit either of the other engines without major structural redesign. The DC-10 offered both Pratt and GE and could have fitted the Rolls as well.
Lockheed made no provisions in the basic design for a high gross weight version while the DC-10 design left room for the third MLG to reduce footprint pressure. Their idea to add a wheel to the outboard side of each axle would have required a huge bulge in the MLG doors.
No factory built freighter or Combi versions were offered. In the end, there were only seven converted to freighters for commercial customers even though there were fleets of surplus pax versions available. That says something as well.
LCC's absence from the commercial market after the L-188 didn't help either as they only had one product to offer.

[rbaiapinto]

Spooky 2

I was lucky enough to have flown both the DC10 and L1011 having about 4000 hours in each type as PIC. To me from a purely pilots point of view, the L1011 was a superior airplane to the DC10.

This is a superb forum. We can find here a lot of valuable and useful info.

Although I don't want to transform this as an L-1011 VS DC-10, Spooky 2, when you say L1011 was a superior airplane, can you substantiate that statement?

And what is your opinion on a new generation L1011 as I have been previously wrote?

Reengine, upgrade to fly-by-wire and glass cockpit would you think this would be an valuable and viable option in the medium term long range market?

Great contributions from you all, thanks