Let's try not to go too much O/T, 'coz this thread is too interesting.
I'm sure there's already another thread (JetBlast probably) with all those jokes.
Anyway, I always thought BEA stood for "Britain's Excuse for an Airline"....

I'm not biased, because I never had the occasion to fly either BEA or the Trident. I regret the latter....
I did fly on the 1-11, though. The very same one that went and got its feet wet off the end of the Corfu runway, one week after I flew on it...

CJ

I am enjoying reading this thread and have learnt a great deal about the Trident. So thank you all
I flew to Venice from LHR with BA in the summer of 1982. IIRC it was a Trident but am not sure which version. Were BA still flying all 3 versions in 1982?

Regards
Nick

I think the first jets with more than two engines which was two crew were the 757/767, introduced some 18 years after the Trident. In fact when the Trident came along there weren't any 2-crew jets at all.

Among the twins, Caravelles were three crew, and even the first 737s had an option of a three crew flight deck, not sure if any were so configured. In the USA, the FAA had an arbitrary upper limit of 80,000 lbs (40 tons) for two-crew operations, which the Trident was well beyond. The first One-Elevens were marginally over this, and not sold in the USA, but it was redesigned as the One-Eleven 400 that came just inside the limit, as did the first short DC9-10s. The restriction was later relaxed when the DC9-30 and 737 came into prospect.

Post 161
 

BEA= Back Every Afternoon
Well thats how it used to be in days of old.

At the risk of thread drift....

WHBM Wrote:

have to disagree - the intial One-Elevens were series 200 and MTOW was originally 73500lbs later 78500lbs (up to 79 pax) and was operated by Braniff, Mohawk and Aloha in the US. The later -400 was 92000lbs, up to 89pax.

Back to Tridents.... Spent a very enjoyable week or so in 1982 with British Airways as part of my ATCO training, 'flying' the Trident 3 Cockpit Procedures Trainer. That was until we broke it :eek: So we rounded off the time getting up at oh-dark hundred to use the full flight sim at Cranebank :) Also made a number of line-trips on the jumpseat - a late evening Bovingdon Snatch onto 10L was certainly interesting as was watching the flourish with which the crews operated the autopilot.

DD

AFAIK there has never been either a 757 or 767 with more than two engines....:} I believe the first two crew civil airliner with more than two engines would have been the MD11, closely followed by the 747-400.

Mt first ever trip was on a 1-11, operated by Maersk Air UK in BA Landor livery from BHX to BFS in 1995. Unfortunately, only being 10 years old at the time I didn't realise the significance of this beautiful machine. Would have asked for a flight deck visit if I had! I reckon we should sod the Euro noise regulations and bring back the old metal :cool:

I see the old jokes are begining to come in over the initials B.E.A. etc but it was my airline and I was very happy to work there, I prefered the Trident 1 to the others and was happy to see the Auto pilot from when it started in 1964 as a very basic system to when it reach the system that was trusted to carry out fully automatic Cat3B/C blind landings with complete faith by all. It had 3 of everything 3 separate power supplies ,3 hydralic systems, pitch and roll computers, gyro units, servo units on each control surface so it was a complicated piece of kit
in fact it was 3 auto pilots working together and if 1 disagreed with the other 2 it was automaticlly disconected from the system and the other 2 carried on ,if they disagreed with each other the system disconnected itself and and the A/C reverted to manual flying but after a lot of work it was finally given the authorisation to do what it was designed to do. :ok::ok::ok:

avionic type,

Myself, I was brought up on the "duplex monitored" principles used on Concorde (and earlier on the VC-10?).

Slightly more hardware, possibly, since each of the two computers contained a complete "duplicate", charged with monitoring the "command" side, and handing over to the other one, if "command" and "monitor" disagreed.

The two computers barely talked to each other (the standby one stayed synchronised, but "kept its mouth shut"), while a triplex system involved a lot more data being exchanged and compared between the computers, hence more and differently designed hardware.

I have no idea what really was the best solution..... espcially since not so soon afterwards we went to digital systems, where we were dealing with a whole new ballpark.

CJ

Oh dear, what a cockup. A real victim of too quick cut-and-paste combined with Getawayitis from the office (note a posting time of 1752 on Friday evening !). I suddenly realised the error driving up the M4 Heathrow spur about 30 minutes later. Now I believe the first more than two engined jet with two crew was the BAe146, which does marginally fit the topic as it followed the Trident some years later down the assembly hall at Hatfield. Any parts of the Trident contributed to the 146 ? I believe its main gear design owes a lot to the Comet.

Any parts of the Trident contributed to the 146 ?
 

Oh the years I have waited for this trivia question.
IIRC the ‘Q’ pot was the same in both aircraft, and possibly the same design as in the Comet (and even the Sea Vixen).
Greater contributions from the Trident were in the experience gained by the design team, the technical and operational certification, and the practical application of the airworthiness philosophies of triplex systems. These were major advances in modern airworthiness.
Lessons learnt from the Trident – the 146 was strong, well built, also like the 125. The 146 had sparkling field performance in comparison ;-)

The two crew certification of the BAe146 was ‘a first’ in that it had to follow precedence set by the BAC 1-11 and DC 9 types, particularly with the FAA – but they had failed to consider that a two crew, 4 eng aircraft, could exist.

After the BEA/BOAC merger, the then L/Haul PLC attempted to preclude the transfer of S/H pilots by imposing an arbitrary experience limit of 4-eng jets only, quite overlooking the fact that Trident 3 was (sometimes) just that and so, a number of the unwashed got their hands on VC10 and B747.

Yes, AJ, and that was when things got interesting.

We flat-earthers had been taught that the 'OD' crowd were aliens. Their SOPs were odd. Everything about them was odd. The BEA people who migrated to VC10s & 747s were looked upon with awe; as though they were throwing themselves into enemy territory, never to be heard of again.

On the other side of the coin, the rule that new commands must be on short-haul meant we (on the Gripper) were flooded with newly promoted OD 'aliens'.

Guess what - they were great guys, and the barriers came tumbling down.

It's odd now to think how tribal British Airways was, in respect of flight-crew. Forced integration fostered mutual respect. And it started on the Gripper.

Shame the flight-deck / CC barriers still exist. (sorry Mods). :)

AD

Does anyone have anything nice to say about The Trident? The best praise I detect from this fascinating thread is mere polite neutrality. As befits well-mannered Nigels.

I'm guessing that it cruised happily at M0.88 or whatever, and I've read that it could descend impressively when called upon. But were any of the variants a vaguely fun stick and rudder machine? I suspect not the "3"

r

Midland 331 - no, not the '3'. The Trident 3 was a stretched T2, with 30-odd seats added. Same wings, same undercarriage, same engines. Ergo - it couldn't get off the ground.

So, they stuck a plastic engine in the tail which was either 'off' or 'full-on'. It couldn't be re-lit in the air. In an infamous incident a T3 lost an engine out of Madrid. I recall that this happened after the plastic engine was shut down. The aircraft returned to Madrid, but had to go around on short finals due a blocked runway.

Without the boost engine, the damned thing wouldn't climb engine-out! They flew around at zero feet trying to build up a little kinetic energy!

In short, the T3 was a nightmare. The wings started to crack eventually beacause the weight was too great. Ugh!

Does anyone have anything nice to say about The Trident?

Yes, the T1 & T2 were brilliant. The T1E was even better. I still get wobbly-knees at how fantastic the T1 & 2 were to fly.

It's the dreadful T3 that I'd prefer to forget! Fortunately, I escaped to the 'new' 757 fleet a few months after being press-ganged onto the '3'.

AD

I had 14 years on the Trident, most of it on the T3. I wouldn't have missed it for anything - great aircraft, great routes and the best bunch of fellow pilots.

From the late 70's onwards, most of the time most people flew manual raw data approaches with manual throttle - just for the pleasure of it, and the level of expertise was second to none.

I think it was the most technically advanced aircraft of its era. It had (IMHO) excellent flying qualities throughout most of the flight envelope but was marred by inadequate performance which was the result of all the b****ing about done by BEA’s management at the very beginning to reduce the basic design requirement. That resulted in it being very difficult to stretch and improve commercially. All the “stretching” done from the 1C to the 3B really just put it back to where it should have been in the first place and exhausted the potential. A T3 with more powerful engines from day 1 could have been stretched to a 200 seater and would have been a real world-beater.

Two examples of its good points. I flew the Trident from early T1 introduction to the point where it started being replaced by the 757 - BA was the launch customer for the 757 along with Eastern. I was lucky enough to be involved on the BA/BALPA 757 liaison team, so we saw a lot of the development work from the inside and got to know a lot of the Boeing test pilots and engineers.

When I managed to get qualified on the 757 fairly soon after it was introduced, there was a conversation with some of the Boeing guys (maybe together with Peter Harper who was the BALPA Tech Committee chairman at the time and also qualified on it) along the lines of “how do you like your new ship?” To which the reply was while we LOVED the power and performance, we weren’t very impressed by the flying qualities which seemed like a step backwards. A Trident handled like a sports car in terms of control response especially in roll, it also had very little trim change with speed and configuration and very light control forces. With a 757 if you took the wheel and rotated it quickly it from one side to the other and back to neutral, the aircraft would just sort of “turn round and look at you” as if to say “oh, are you talking to me?”. Similarly, with an asymmetric approach, every time you changed the power, you had to re-trim in all three axes.

Maybe these comments were slightly exaggerated for effect, but the Boeing guys were astonished and said that we ex-Trident pilots were the only people who had commented negatively about the 757’s flying qualities. But the only other people who had been exposed to it at that time were accustomed to other Boeing and/or Douglas products and measuring from a different "norm".

Another early experience was when I flew a 757 service which replaced the Trident on either Brussels or Amsterdam, and we had thick fog. I had to delay departure for quite a while till the RVR improved as the lowest 757 takeoff RVR was higher than that of the Trident with its PVDs. It was caustically noted by some of our regular passengers the old T1s that were then being broken up had a better all-weather capability than their shiny new replacements!

…anything nice to say about…
 

Yes, they do. We ex Gripper chaps are professional aviators and we do not go all gooey over our aircraft. We flew and enjoyed ourselves without fuss. (Tongue in cheek, in case.) I went from “Guardsvan” to Tridents as F/O, back to Merchantman as LHS and then back to Tridents. I had 2 years in each of the Trident seats and enjoyed it immensely. It really was a marvelous aeroplane and going back to the VC9 seemed like going back to the stone age. I remember Slast very well but did not have nearly such a distinguished Trident career as he did, so I cannot comment on the background of much that went on. I remember well sitting on the edge of my seat during the early days of autoland. There was an alarming, but fortunately rare, likelihood that it would either try a reverse acquire or do something equaling entertaining at the flare. I used to wish that all the dolls eyes and other A/L indications could be grouped together in a ladder, to advance progressively to (hopefully) give a LAND decision. I, too, converted to the 75 and there was the ASA!! And I was dumbstruck at climbing to FL410 in 20 mins – on the Gripper, one applied “contingency power” (an extra 200 rpm!) when the rate of climb fell to 300fpm. Getting to cruise could easily take 30 mins or more and yes, the T2 had a Fin tank which would be empty before TOC. But to answer the question – YES, it was brilliant and great fun to fly. Only the 767 has anything like its controls response – and that definitely in ROLL only.
I remember the report on the 2 eng go around for the T3 at MAD (the R/W layout had been sitting there just waiting for this to happen). The average ROC was 200 FPM and the ATC reported that when it disappeared behind the hills they did not expect to see it reappear. I never discovered why the Boost was never cleared for an inflight start – I bet that crew wished it had!
Prober

Subsequent to the MAD incident, a procedure was introduced where the boost could be started in flight. It involved a very lengthy procedure with CB's being pulled to make it think it was on the ground and an extremely small relight speed window (IIRC). The Chinese insisted on this from the start on their T3's.

With Gil Gray, I took one of the T3's to Hatfield for sorting out the wing cracks. While we were waiting for the transport back to LHR John Cunningham showed us round one of the Chinese examples. All the decals were in Chinese and the flight deck extended back to the fwd door, where the fwd toilet usually was, to make space for a huge desk portside rear, where the 'Commondant' of the aircraft sat - inter alia making sure the crew didn't defect to the West.

I too spent 9 happy years on the Trident mainly Threes and don't recognise some of the adverse comments made. As conveyed so well by Steve, the problems of lack of thrust were of BEA's making - but entering a descent after boost engine shutdown - absolute tosh. As for its flying qualities they were superb - and I've seen it up to the high subsonics, with no signs of mach buffet or need for artificial devices. By contrast, the Tristar required the terrifying Recovery Speed Brake and the DC10 hit a wall above M.85 needing bank angle limitation to obviate buffet during cruise.
How good to see Pete and Steve going strong though Pete barely recognisable without pipe.

poor performance
 

I think one of the reasons that the "it wouldn't climb with an engine out" story came so common was actually that the aircraft obviously DID meet the requirement to be able to climb - but without much to spare most of the time! Most people (fortunately!) don't ever experience how low a gradient and how little clearance is actually required to meet the performance requirements - it is very little indeed!

Virtually all our experience is gained with all engines operating, and in circumstances where we are well within the limits of the performance envelope. In normal operation the Gripper unfortunately seemed to sit a lot closer to the edges of the envelope than most other types do. Fortunately at that time the ARB (predecessors to the CAA) used to require a sample of every fleet to be air tested each year to ensure that the overall performance was still typical of that demonstrated in initial certification. I suspect (I don't know) that's been jettisoned under JAA/FAA harmonisation of rules as the Americans certainly didn't like that idea, but I remember flying as P3 to Gordon Corps doing one of these recurrent air tests. (Gordon was CAA chief test pilot before joining Airbus in 1982, and a member of the SAE S-7 "what goes where" committee I referred to earlier (Post #117). One certainly realised how little climb capability was needed to meet the rules when seeing it demonstrated by someone like that - I was stunned by how precisely he could fly the aircraft straight off the ground when probably he hadn't been near one for over a year, and any "wobbles" away from the precise optimum speed would certainly affect the outcome.

Anyone interested in hearing how BA internal politics and Trident reverse-in-flare landing nearly screwed up NASA's Air Safety Reporting System??

Yes! :) ........... and any news on the inboard PTTs?

I had 2 engine failures in my career, both on T3's. Both were on rotation and both when I happened to be handling pilot. On neither occasion was there any problem with climb rate, although one was GLA-LHR and the second LHR-GLA, so not particularly heavy. The controls felt a bit wishy washy compared to normal, but no problem.

The first was #2 in YZ in June '76, my logbook tells me. As I rotated there was a loud muffled bang and I felt the control column being pushed forward, immediately followed by it being pulled back, then returning to the trimmed position. I had to resist the forces quite strongly to keep the column where I wanted it to maintain attitude during the rotation.

The aircraft had had a history of yellow hydraulics problems on initial climb, so P1&P3 looked up to the hyd levers for the stuck valve light, as I said check the hydraulics as I felt the forces through the column. Nothing there, no yaw of course, I glanced at the engine instruments and saw the TGT of #2 off the clock. No fire, shut down and return, right hand visual circuit to 06.

The second in VF in Jan '80

(With PMc). #1 blew up on rotation, with an incredibly long and loud graunching sound - it sounded like, and felt through the controls, and I thought, the U/C had collapsed as I rotated. It felt to me like we were being 'held' on the ground by the collapsed oleos dragging along the runway, and I remember being slightly surprised to see a positive rate of climb as the rotation progressed and we eventually got airborne. PMc thought we had hit a vehicle. Again no climb problems.

I remember thinking after the second one, this was the classic scenario, just what we do in the Sim, an engine failing on rotation, yet neither of these was anything like I had experienced in 12 years on simulator checks to date. Because of what else was happening, and the visual, tactile and aural clues we were getting, on both occasions, with no fire bell, not one crew member's first thought was that we were experiencing an engine failure - although it was very quickly picked up.

Still got some melted fan blades from both incidents.

Yes, Go on Steve!

Fascinating to read these insights on the Trident from you guys who do the pedalling.
From a pax point of view I always enjoyed flying in the Trident (moreso than the S1-11), always comfortable and seemed to handle turbulence well and of course those were the days when full service airline meant just that!!
On my earlier question about the 3 pilot crew, who decide which crew member would be P2 or P3? Could P3 count his hours sitting in the middle seat watching the guages.? Did P2 and P3 change seats with each sector?

Not wanting to get in the way of slast's story, but I have a question about the Trident.

I flew as SLF on this type at least a couple of dozen times, and every time I was in a seat that had a view of the wing I noticed that the aileron was constantly moving. Not in a random fashion, but systematically up and down a few degrees pausing for a second or so at the end of each move, with an attendant roll back and forth. The roll was most noticeable if the sun was casting shadows inside the cabin which moved up and down - it was a bit like being on a ship.

I saw this often enough for it to be a norm rather than a particular aircraft with a lazy autopilot.

Anyone else notice this?

p2/p3
 

Wookey,
The Gripper in BA service was unusual in that all the First Officers were licensed in both the copilot and flight engineer seats. Typically (unless there was a training or other requirement for one pilot to be in a particular seat) the two F/Os would toss a coin to decide who sat where for the first sector and then changed seats each leg. The P3 was fully integrated into the overall flying tasks rather than "watching the gauges", and not licensed as a Flight Engineer who could carry out additional engineering tasks on turnarounds. So time as P3 was counted fully as "Copilot" hours.

With experienced crews and suitable conditions, many captains operated a leg and leg basis that meant that on a three sector day which was pretty common everyone got a takeoff and a landing in the course of the day.

slast

Thanks for the explanation

TRC

I never really noticed this and I probably flew several times a month most on Tridents for maybe 10 years. But then maybe I was just enjoying the full service too much to notice !! Be interesting to hear if the 'pros' have any insight into this

TRC Unlike some types (eg 737) you couldn't see the wings from the flight deck windows. I was never aware of what you describe.

...regarding the climb performance, the standing joke was:-

Scottish -".... can you make 300 or above by the Cross*?"

Trident - " Not even Northbound."

* Dean Cross - VOR about 80 nms South of GLA/EDI

Yes I agree...I don't recognise some of the adverse comments. To me it was a superb aeroplane and I loved flying it. It was also very easy to fly legs in a shorter time than scheduled. I was hardly ever late for ten years!

Hey! I gave up the pipe long before I retired :)

Well, it wasn't much of a roll - it didn't spill your your drink... You could just see the t/e of the aileron appearing and disappearing relative to the t/e of the wing. The moving shadow was a little more obvious when there was one.

It always fascinated me - maybe I should have taken a better book..

Reverse idle, politics and incident reports
 

It was a dark and stormy night……
Actually we’ll start a bit earlier. Remember the sequence post WW2 – the old Imperial Airways was relaunched by the new Labour government as BOAC and BEA. I think that given the chance some of the more radical thinkers went to develop BEA’s new high density European network while the traditionalists stayed with the old Imperial “flag carrier” tasks of BOAC. In flight ops certainly BEA had a lot of challenges including a high exposure to poor visibility ops and was prepared to develop new thinking on a variety of issues including training flight deck procedures and so on.

BEA’s management seemed to take the view that if existing solutions don’t fix a problem, you need to find a new solution even if goes against tradition. BOAC’s seemed to be that its practices were the best there could be, and required extremely high individual performance: in general, safety problems were due to failure to meet those standards, and that could be fixed by dealing with individuals by disciplinary or other means. There were thus two very different philosophies about how to achieve the best safety results in the two corporations.

So when the decision was taken to create BA by bringing them back under a single roof, but retaining “autonomous operating divisions”, what had previously been a legitimate rivalry between two separate organisations became entrenched internal warfare. This led to weird situations and turf wars where groups which were supposed to be on the same side were actually allied with their nominal “enemies”, e.g. in discussions with the pilots it wasn’t so much “BA management vs BALPA for BA pilots” as “Longhaul pilots and management” vs “shorthaul pilots and management” with leaks and “conspiracies” galore, especially before the privatisation of BA forced a proper merger to take place (eventually).

One of BA’s best aspects has always been having an independent Safety Branch, independent of departmental managements and reporting directly to the Board and giving the Board clear overall responsibility for corporate safety. The Air Safety Adviser therefore carries a lot of “clout” which is good in many ways - but can have drawbacks.

As I said earlier, BEA was never averse to making radical changes if it thought them necessary and the need to fix the low visibility ops problems led to the autoland programme which among other things required validation of test landings. This in turn led to the development of much more advanced flight recorders and in particular the Quick Access Recorder, which could be analysed after every flight.

There was also a difference in attitude between the pilots’ representatives in BALPA on the technical/safety side and those on the industrial side, with again the “techies” tending to be more open to changes while the industrial guys were very suspicious of them especially when initiated by management. Anyway, over the years collectively BALPA, BA and the CAA developed understandings about the use of flight recorders for ACCIDENT investigation, about confidential “no blame” incident reporting which basically led the world. This then led to an agreement with BA about the use of FDRs for INCIDENT analysis, and which has eventually led toroutine use for preventive measures in QAR programmes etc.

It was basically BALPA and BA which did the ground-breaking work on all that. So all this was followed with interest elsewhere, especially by NASA who were keen to introduce similar confidential anonymous reporting and so forth in the US, against a lot of opposition from many in ALPA, as well as some voices in the FAA and DOT, who were concerned about the legal implications etc. So how BA’s agreement worked was seen as setting some pretty important precedents.

So much for the background - now to the “dark and stormy night”…... and a T3 is making an approach at a Spanish coastal airport. There is a big T-storm approaching the far end of the runway. The Trident NORMAL landing procedure as noted earlier in this thread, is to close the throttles and select reverse idle (pod engines obviously) IN THE FLARE. This was actioned by the P2 as non-handling pilot, the handling pilot P1 having both hands on the yoke. Optionally one could then select FULL reverse while in the flare, and this was a very effective technique on short or wet runways as the Trident had pretty mediocre brakes. So the crew brief for this technique, in the flare the call is “Power off and full reverse”. The P2 closes the thrust levers and immediately pulls up the reverser levers, the buckets deploy and the pod engines never spool down but increase RPM from the approach value to close to full power for a few moments, then back to idle as the aircraft slows. The aircraft has rolled into a wall of water at touchdown and during the rollout the P3 notices that the antiskid stops working on the right gear. Roll onto the ramp, the rain is bucketing down and an engineer comes aboard to report that two tyres are burst and four are badly scalded.

Then all the lights go out in the region as the rainwater floods the area. So the a/c is on the ground for the night while some new tyres are shipped down. The crew write up on of the new Mandatory Occurrence forms for the burst tyre incident and return to base, and life goes on as normal.

About a month later the Captain gets a summons to see his manager, who has a “confidential” engineer’s analysis of the QAR, saying that (inter alia) the tyres were burst because “the pilots had not used the recommended landing technique of selecting reverse IDLE in the flare. In a sort of drumhead court-martial, the Captain is suspended and is required to do a base check before being allowed back on the line.

At this point the s*** hit the fan because they had effectively taken disciplinary action against an employee without complying with any of the requirements of their own disciplinary procedures. Not only that, the pilot involved happened to be one of the BALPA reps involved in developing the agreement on the use of FDRs for incident analysis, and the management have just busted every clause in it!

The whole event demonstrated why the agreement had all the clauses about getting ALL the information, and involving all parties including the crew members concerned, BEFORE reaching a conclusion as to what happened. They had just gone raw FDR > engineers interpretation > management > disciplinary action. (Of course the bare statement about not using the reverse IDLE was correct, unfortunately the trace does not contain the reverser position.)

So what was the politics behind it? One interpretation was it was an opportunity to make an example: “OK, if we can get a BALPA rep right at the start we’ll never have a problem using FDR info to prove pilots haven't complied with recommended procedures”. More likely in my view was that there had already been a major difference of view at top level about the company philosophy. The air safety adviser, was ex BOAC and seemed to believe that pilots who had incidents and had not followed recommended procedures to the letter should be disciplined. The ex BEA chief pilot I think took a much more nuanced view of the complexities of everyday operation and was actually reluctant to use disciplinary action per se. I suspect the chief pilot knew the engineer’s analysis was automatically sent to the board’s Air Safety adviser, and decided to pre-empt any criticism (“here’s another of your pilots screwing up, what are you going to do about it?”) and clear his own yard-arm by just getting the pilot re-confirmed as competent, so he could tell the Air Safety head where to go. But it didn’t work out quite like that because he was out on a limb on both the actual event and the procedures.

Internally the upshot was a letter of apology from the Deputy Flight Ops Director to the Captain concerned (via BALPA!) and an acknowledgement that the whole thing had been grossly mishandled, to the great embarrassment of the company, followed shortly after by some changes of management pilots. However, it nearly caused the whole agreement to come off the rails, just at the time when NASA was trying to convince US ALPA that airlines and authorities could be trusted to use safety data responsibly and not use it to screw individuals who took part. When Charlie Billings who was running a lot of that activity heard about what had happened, he was afraid that word would soon get out in the wider industry. I thought he was going to have a heart attack, as the BA/BALPA agreement was being held up as a global example of how this stuff could be made to work, and here was the first example of what actually happened! Fortunately we damped it down and things proceeded smoothly in the long run, but it could easily have turned out differently.

You mean like this!



http://i1185.photobucket.com/albums/...entcockpit.jpg

Steve, your post reminds us that a lasting legacy of the Trident was that on completion of the autoland proving trials, the company found themselves with a redudent 64 channel data recorder on the entire fleet. This data could have been used in a variety of ways, some of them harsh & disciplinarian. However, BEA and BALPA came up with the enlightened SESMA programme which in my view is one of the greatest single contributors to air safety.
Then again Papa India, the main cause of which was the Tridents big design flaw - not incorporating flap & droop into a single lever, brought about the introduction of CVR

AJ, agree completely.

Slast: really enjoyed your "stormy night " tale, but wasn`t that rather close to home......................

Or in other words "like a De Havilland" - to paraphrase "Cats-Eye" Cunningham... ;)

Meikleour, I have no idea what you mean....! ;)

I believe that John Cunningham himself didn't like the feline nickname at all - although my only contact with him was a passing "Hello Mr Cunningham" when he opened the Biggin Hill show about 10 years ago.

The only thing 'terrifying' about the Recovery Speed Brake was the UKCAA's insistance that one be fitted. There was no such requirement by the FAA, who by the way, originally certified the aircraft.
The UKCAA always was a bit obtuse in the certification department...:rolleyes: