Hawker Siddeley HS 748 Super 748

The Super 748 first flew in the summer of 1984, almost a quarter of a century after the original prototype. It started from the Series 2B and added what the mid-1980s market considered essential: an updated flight deck, better-burning Dart engines, a new galley and a redesigned passenger interior. The hush kits, aimed at airports that were starting to impose noise limits, are the feature sources mention most often.

Flight crew was two pilots, plus a cabin attendant where the operation called for one. The cabin took between forty and fifty-eight passengers, or a payload above five tonnes. It kept the 2B's extended wing at just over thirty-one metres of span and the same twenty-odd metres of fuselage as the 1960 aircraft.

At twenty-one tonnes maximum take-off weight the Super 748 cruised above four hundred and fifty kilometres per hour and covered some seventeen hundred kilometres at maximum payload, climbing to twenty-five thousand feet. Field length remained its strongest argument: under twelve hundred metres to take off over a fifteen-metre obstacle.

Very few were built. Production of the 748 ended in 1988 and the last British-assembled aircraft flew on 1 December of that year. British Aerospace had already committed to the ATP, a stretched version with Pratt & Whitney Canada engines, which never repeated its predecessor's success. Wikipedia uses the Super 748's figures as the type's reference specification.