'Clear to Land', 1968 Trident 1C Promo Film, BEA Hawker Siddeley | Archival Films

Video from the channel Archival Films about Hawker Siddeley Trident, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 20:29. Language: English. Video type: Archive footage.

Promotional film by British European Airways titled "Clear to Land", about the airline's automation on the ground and in the air. It opens at BEA's terminal in west London and in the booking hall. There the BEACON computer system replaces manual ticket handling, answers around 10,000 calls a day and links London with Belfast, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Dublin, Amsterdam and Paris.

The central section explains the Hawker Siddeley Trident's automatic landing: three computers that monitor each other, capturing the runway beam at around 2,000 feet, engaging automatic mode at around 1,000 feet and the final flare from 65 feet, with the pilot monitoring the instruments. It shows tests on a test stand at Hawker Siddeley's Hatfield site and a test flight narrated by a manufacturer's pilot.

According to the title, the film is from 1968 and features the Trident 1C. The final section follows a scheduled flight from Paris to London with 77 passengers. While Paris is sunny, England is shrouded in fog, and the aircraft lands at Heathrow using the automatic system. Scenes of the departure airport, the passenger cabin, the flight deck and the final approach are intercut.

The film presents fog as the worst operational problem of the time: according to the narration, low visibility at London Airport had cancelled or disrupted hundreds of flights a year. The Trident appears as an aircraft designed from the outset for automatic landing, which came as standard on BEA's aircraft. It is said to have already made thousands of automatic landings, with the goal of operating in visibilities of 100 feet or less. BEA, which carried over seven million passengers a year, presents this automation as a guarantee of punctuality.