Aviation Nostalgia Forum | The trident how good or bad was it ?

During the good old days the HS Trident main competition was the Boeing 727 and DC9,which i am sorry to say sold about a thousand more planes. why?
1. was the Trident that "bad" that only BEA and such airlines as Cyprus bought them.
2 the aircraft was only built to BEA specs and Hawker had no intention to export it to the world..
3 there was rumours at the time that the aircraft was sold cheaper to Cyprus ie on loan from BEA and BEA would be responsible for the serviceing...
Its a great shame that the "boreing" Trident was never much of a success and no chance against the might of Boeing and Douglas.
Again the Vickers VC10 had the same problem few airlines bought the aircraft ie a number of african airlines got them.some of them are used by the RAF even to this day...

The Trident was hamstrung by a poor engine choice, as BEA and the Government wanted it to have the Spey engine. This meant all tridents lacked the power of the later 727.

If Rolls Royce had been allowed to develop the Derwent turbofan for the Trident it would have been a much improved aircraft. Far from boring, the Trident pioneered a load of technology we see in use today (even on the A380 forward wing edge). It just lacked performance and range.

The VC10 was built for the Empire routes where runways were not that long. Hence overpowered. The airports eventually extended their runways for 707s and DC8s making the VC10 a gas guzzling redundant oddity. Made a cracking tanker though!

The Trident pioneered the Autoland system that is now taken for granted. Both the VC10 and Trident could have been world beaters if they had had proper government backing, or the financial clout of the Americans....

The Trident itself was absolutely fine. it was those engnes.

The Spey wasn't up to the job. Whilst it was a cheap and dirty solution, the Trident wasn't a 1-11 and just sticking a third engine on did not solve the problem. Rolls Royce had the larger Derwent designed for the job but the Government of the day and BEA both pushed this out of the picture. The Spey was seen as a better investment.

The Derwent would have also been a strong candidate for a plane called the 727 that Boeing was developing. However Rolls Royce didn't get the needed backing to develop it further for the Trident.

The Trident was therefore underpowered and forever had the reputation as a "ground-gripper", even when the Trident 3 had a fourth turbojet booster added to try and improve matters.

Would I be correct in thinking that (some of) the BEA Tridents had rear-facing seats? I swear that I once flew back from OPO to LHR facing backwards.

sounds to me it was a "if only" situation !
Pretty shure the plane was designed and developed with BEA in mind and export sales was not important.
I am right in thinking that PIA the pakistan airline had Tridents for short and medium long flights ?
Was these planes old trident ones and two"s that BEA replaced with newer Tridents..

PIA operated a total of four 'hot and high' Trident 1E's between 1966 and 1970. PIA's Tridents had been ordered to replace Viscounts and were used on domestic and regional services from Karachi, Lahore and Rawalpindi to Dacca and later to the Persian Gulf destinations which included Bahrain, Doha, Kuwait and Dubai. Tridents also took over the 'Inter-wing' service from the airline's Boeing 720B's, linking West and East Pakistan. Later, PIA found that its Tridents had been so effective in generating traffic that passenger numbers on its regional routes had outgrown the Trident's capacity. The airline acquired a number of Boeing 707's to replace the Tridents between June and November 1970. All four PIA Tridents had been transferred to the Chinese national carrier Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) by the end of 1970 under a barter trade agreement between Pakistan and China.

(The History of PIA - Pakistan International Airlines)

you probably did, some Tridents had groups of facing seats (as did one-elevens) for some odd reason. Generally round the overwing exit area if memory serves.

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Check out this video, from Bruce Dickinson series 'Flying Heavy Metal'. Gives a little bit insight into the Trident

Great series that, nice to see a British series dedicated to British aircraft!!!

quoting jonf45 & trotsenstein.I agree,the likes of Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson & the Trident were/are a couple of great British icons.Didn't catch the whole series,but i'm sure it was good.

The RAF VC10s all had rear facing seats initially. Reason being that rear-facing seats are safer in a crash as you decelerate against the seat instead of away from it, so less flailing injuries.

Airlines didn't think that the travelling public would accept totally rear-facing airliner interiors despite the safety benefits.

We British also came up with some loonier inventions such as the double-dinner seatback. The seat back in front of you would have two locking compartments above the tray table. One was opened on the outbound flight and the other one on the return leg, each containing a cold-type meal. All the crew then had to do was serve drinks and tidy away.

These were built into some early Court Line 1-11s but were discontinued due to minor issues like food poisoning, especially if the return flight was delayed and ended up sat on a hot apron!

Found this thread quite interesting.
Apart from BEA the Trident was operated by Cyprus Airways, BKS Air Transport, Channel Airways, PIA,
CAAC and Iraqi Airlines.
I fulfilled an ambition in the '70's when I flew in a Trident 3 to Malta.

First of all the Trident was a remarkable aircraft in its day. Yes, Trident 1's were underpowered and even the T3 with it's 4th engine 'booster' wasn't all that. Apart from poor power to weight ratio the Trident was highly innovative in design, especially autoland mentioned before, later wing design with slats, up and over passenger doors (similar to the Tristar), some seating configurations with rear facing seats (like on a train). I flew on the Trident a few times and never thought anything about rear facing seats.

The unfortunate thing about the Trident and I suppose many British aircraft of that era was Government interferance, strong influence over design by one carrier (BEA), poor marketing and funding. The original DH121 design was deemed to be superior in perfomance to the B727 original design. American Airlines may have chosen the Trident over the B727 had it had the original specification. BEA's preference for reducing the spec for their own specific market put an end to any AA orders.

How differently things could have turned out.

I can't help thinking, if British design engineers are so good and tend to produce some very innovative products, why is that we just can't get the orders in? I suppose it could be a case that innovation, and being first, is not always a good thing. Comet vs. B707, 1-11 vs. DC-9/B737, Trident vs. B727...

Are we just rubbish at marketing and listening to a broad customer base, or was/is there some other factor at work that puts a nail in the coffin.

Government policy was the biggest factor. Engine makers were starved of money and the airlines outside the core State ones basically ignored.

A Trident with Derwent engines and a better wing would have left the 727 for dead. Even Boeing initially wanted the Derwent over the JT8D to power the 727, but the Government of the UK refused the development money to Rolls Royce who could not have financed it themselves.

Other alternative histories also exist, that pressure was put on via the CIA-riddled establishment to ensure superior British engineering was suppressed (TSR2 and all that) in exchange for nuclear technology sold at discounted prices (Polaris etc). The Fifties and Sixties were murky times.

Yes Whitehatter, totally agree with that theory. And with better judgement by the government of the day could quite easily have turned around the British aviation industry and been something even today.

What about the disposal of all the UK Harriers to the USMC long before delivery of it's replacement from BAE Systems and Lockheed Martin etc who have a vested interest in the demise of the UK Harrier force which had far outnumbered the quantity of F-35's on order, if they ever get delivered to serve off a carrier that's yet to be completed, simpy due to a lack of government vision, and maybe a little duplicity on the side. It's happened before....

Nimrod too, we are buying converted KC135s to replace them! Defence procurement is a joke. In the 1970s there was a blueprint for a Harrier 2 which had supersonic capability which got squashed. It had some drawbacks to engineer out (like melting carrier decks!) but it could have been flying in the 80s.

It looked like a streamlined Harrier, similar nozzle setup but much smoother lines and much more powerful. It would have needed plenum chamber reheat to lift vertically though and that would have burnt through metal decking. The money instead went into the current Harrier and making it suitable for the US Marines.

We also had that Trident proposal using the fuselage six abreast with underwing high bypass engines that got abandoned. Looked strangely like the 757....but years in advance.