Hawker Siddeley Trident Super Trident 3B

The Super Trident 3B was the final version of the Hawker Siddeley Trident and also its rarest: only two were built, and they were the last two Tridents to leave the Hatfield production line. It was an adaptation of the Trident 3B, the stretched high-capacity version Hawker Siddeley had developed for BEA with a fuselage 5.00 m longer than the 2E and a fourth Rolls-Royce RB.162 booster engine in the tail, a small turbojet that supplied 5,230 lb of extra thrust only during take-off and climb. The 3B had first flown on 11 December 1969 and entered service with BEA on 1 April 1971, but its range at maximum payload, around 2,408 km, made it a short- and medium-haul aircraft designed for BEA's European network rather than for the distances of a continental country such as China.

The customer behind the Super 3B was precisely CAAC, the Civil Aviation Administration of China, which after the thaw in relations between Britain and the People's Republic had become the Trident's main export buyer. CAAC had received four second-hand Trident 1Es from Pakistan International Airlines in 1970 and, from 1972, began taking delivery of 33 new Trident 2Es, making it the second-largest operator of the type after BEA/British Airways. In November 1972 it added two extended-range Trident 3Bs to those orders. The change from the production 3B was simple in concept: airframe, Spey engines and RB.162 booster were retained, and additional fuel capacity was added. As a result, range at maximum payload rose from 1,300 nautical miles to 1,825 (3,380 km), 692 km more than the standard 3B and enough to cover China's domestic trunk routes and regional services around the Far East.

The first Super Trident 3B for CAAC made its first take-off at Hatfield on 9 July 1975. Both aircraft flew their tests under provisional British registrations before receiving Chinese ones: the first, G-BAJL, became B-268 and left Hatfield for China on 22 August 1975; the second, G-BAJM (construction number 328), became B-270 and was still being photographed on test flights over Nuthampstead on 24 September 1975, with the Chinese registration already painted on the upper surface of the starboard wing. With these two deliveries Trident production came to an end: 117 aircraft were built across all versions, and these two Super 3Bs were the last of them.

In service, CAAC used the Super 3Bs on domestic and regional routes within China and around the Far East, alongside its large fleet of 2Es. When CAAC was broken up into separate airlines during the 1980s, many of its Tridents passed to Air China, which operated five former CAAC Tridents between 1988 and 1991, and to China United Airlines. By then the type had already vanished from British skies, where British Airways retired its last Tridents in 1985-1986 in the face of new ICAO noise rules, and the Chinese aircraft were left as the final representatives of the Hatfield tri-jet: the last Trident flights in China, and therefore in the world, are thought to have taken place as late as 1995.

The Super Trident 3B thus occupies a peculiar place in the history of the type. It was the only serious attempt to correct the range limitation that had handicapped the Trident ever since BEA had the design shrunk at the drawing-board stage, and it came too late and in too small a number to change the commercial balance of the programme. Yet it was the version that closed production, the one that gave the Trident its final years of active service outside Britain, and proof that, with more fuel on board, the aircraft could have been considerably more versatile than it was.