Hawker Siddeley Trident guided tour.

Video from the channel Paul Stewart about Hawker Siddeley Trident, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 26:29. Language: English. Video type: Onboard.

Guided tour, outside and inside, of the Trident 2E in the British airliner collection at the Duxford museum: nose, wings, landing gear, engines, tail, passenger cabin and flight deck. It first reviews the aircraft's origin. BEA asked for a medium-sized jet and received several proposals: de Havilland's DH.119 and DH.120, the Bristol Type 200, the Avro 740 and the Vickers VC11. The DH.121 won, designed for 111 seats. BEA then wanted it for 97: weight, wingspan and length were reduced, and the Medway engines were swapped for Rolls-Royce Speys. In 1960 Hawker Siddeley bought de Havilland, and the Trident made its first flight on 9 January 1962, 13 months before the Boeing 727.

The nose wheel is offset and retracts sideways to make room for a large avionics bay. That is where the triplex Autoland system was housed, in which two of the three computers had to agree to continue with the automatic landing. Also shown are the artificial feel system for the controls and the wing with 35° of sweep, which allowed cruise speeds above 980 km/h but gave little lift at low speed. Also visible are the wing fences, the main landing gear with four wheels on a single axle, the center engine fed by an S-duct, the thrust reversers that could be used in flight, the bay for the RB162 auxiliary engine on the Trident 3B, the relocations of the APU and the exhaust silencers. On the T-tail, the risk of deep stall led to the installation of a stick shaker and a pneumatic stick pusher. On the fuselage, patches over bullet impacts are visible. The cabin has 3-3 seating for 115 passengers, and the cockpit retains the moving paper map guided by Doppler radar and the flight engineer's station.

This aircraft was leased to Cyprus Airways in June 1973. In 1974, during the Turkish invasion, it was hit by gunfire at Nicosia airport. It returned to the UK unpressurised, was repaired and flew until March 1982. In 1990 it was repainted in BEA colours. The video also recalls the 1972 accident, with 118 dead, in which the slats retracted instead of the flaps, and the 1971 accident in Mongolia with Lin Biao on board. 24 Trident 1Cs, 15 Trident 1Es and 50 Trident 2Es were built (the largest buyer was China's CAAC), plus the 3B and 2 Super Trident 3Bs: 117 in total until 1978. The 1986 noise regulations hastened its retirement, although in China it kept flying until 1995.