Requiem for a Trijet Masterpiece – The Lockheed L-1011 | Hacker News Reader

Requiem for a Trijet Masterpiece – The Lockheed L-1011

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While I was at Boeing working on the 757, I heard a story that there was an L-1011 flight where all three elevator actuators froze due to ice buildup in a nose-up attitude. The pilot got on the horn and asked all the passengers to move forward as far as possible to get the nose down. He then landed the airplane using differential thrust on the 3 engines to control pitch. It was a feat of airmanship famously repeated years later on UA Flight 232 (though the beleaguered FL232 pilots didn't have yaw or roll control, either).

Since part of my job was working the 757 elevator actuators, icing was a huge concern. The systems are designed to drain off any water accumulation, slough off ice or simply power through it.

There's an engaging account of this incident in an American Airlines training seminar that's now on Youtube - it's even more dramatic than your summary suggests:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfNBmZy1Yuc&feature=youtu.be...

(Incidentally, this is the video series that includes the famous "Children of Magenta" lecture, which is a must-watch for anyone who designs or thinks about how to use a system with multiple levels of abstraction: https://youtu.be/pN41LvuSz10)

I must have misremembered it, because I had thought it was ice jamming the actuators, not the stab trim. But thanks for the link!

Edit: Vindicated! This link says it was the elevator! http://www.aahs-online.org/journals/journal_template.php?vol...

And a somewhat different account of the same incident: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1978/10/08/t...

Oh man, I'd love to read a similar article from you about the engineering of the 757.

There's generally very few sources that go deep into the engineering of planes, I'd guess because there are trade secrets.

I'd like to, but it isn't exactly fresh in my mind (35 years ago), and I am concerned about trade secrets. Most people are bored by my Boeing stories :-)

But I share your enjoyment of engineering stories. For example, I love reading about how the Wrights conquered their engineering problems one by one, and get annoyed when the author doesn't know his way around engineering and compensates by writing about the Wrights' love lives. Argh.

BTW, the Boeing engineers of my day did have a lot of respect for the Tristar's engineering. That's a high compliment in my book :-)

One unintended side effect of the autoland system was it was too good - the airplanes would hit the runway in exactly the same spot each landing. The result was the runway would disintegrate at that point. The engineers had to go back and put a "fuzz factor" in.

Is anybody else amazed that this was able to do a completely automated flight in 1972? Compared to our reliance on modern computing, it's astonishing what people were able to accomplish figuring everything out manually.

Granted, it blows my mind that we went to the moon in an era where a calculator weighed 20lbs and was the size of a briefcase, so maybe growing up with computers makes it hard to imagine life without them.

It is an amazing feat, but given the calibre of the avionics expertise that Lockheed had then, I would expect nothing less.

Many of the TriStar autoland engineers came from the British company Smiths, which had developed operational autolanding systems for the Trident and Belfast.

Here's a proud Smiths ad from 1965

https://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1965/1965%20-%2...

I think it's more a symptom of how out of touch people are with the age of many of the things we think of as "advanced" tech. The first aircraft autopilot system was developed in 1912; instrument landings have been around since the 1920s; and fully operational autoland predates the TriStar by almost a decade.

Granted, early instrument landing systems weren't as precise or as convenient as their modern-day equivalents, but you can implement basic ILS with a few carefully-placed radio antennas (and in fact that's how it was done back in the day), and the modern systems work on exactly the same principles.

I flew on an L-1011 in 1997 when I was a senior in high school, and the aircraft felt very old. I saw a nameplate near the galley that showed the aircraft having been made in the early 1970s, and I was amazed that something could possibly fly that long (that was before 30 year aircraft depreciation became standard). Those fancy interiors the article mentioned must have been difficult to update because I remember the aircraft having that same interior layout. I don't recall the airline, but it was a major.

Ironically I had flown a more modern MD-11 on the first leg of that trip, and I was totally unaware of the history of the two aircraft. Knowing what I know today about the safety record of the two designs, I probably should have been more appreciative of the Lockheed.

> and I was amazed that something could possibly fly that long

It isn't the same plane flying 30 years later. There are standardised checks done at various intervals, including the D check which takes the entire plane apart. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_maintenance_checks

Those checks will replace damaged and limited life parts. The cabin fittings have to be taken out for the D check anyway, so many airlines will replace them at that point if not sooner (eg carpets wear out a lot quicker).

The air frame is basically the same, you can't patch that up. I'm surprised that has lasted so long...how do they deal with basic metal fatigue?

When it comes to mind boggling longevity, nothing can compare to the B-52. The first prototype flew in 1952 and the last one was built in 1962 and the final plane is still in active service. There is an upgrade program that plans to keep them flying until 2044. The planes will be more than 80 years old by then.

> I don't recall the airline, but it was a major.

It was most likely Delta.

Assuming you're in the US, it was either TWA or Delta because they were the only ones still operating the L-1011 by the late 1990s. United also operated a small fleet of L-1011s that they acquired from Pan Am, but (I believe) they had mostly gotten rid of them by 1997.

Delta operated the largest fleet of L-1011s by far. At one point they operated nearly half of the (admittedly small number of) L-1011s built. They were also the only airline that I can think of that operated both the L-1011 and MD-11 in the 1990s.

There's a particularly interesting quote in this article that doesn't have much to do with the subject, but really struck me.

> The late 1960s was a time in which just about anything seemed possible. The stars – man was moving ever closer, using his knowledge to realize dreams that had been held for centuries.

As someone at the comparatively young age of 28, I simply can't think of a time in my life where there was ever the same general feeling across the USA. Maybe the 90s, but the exuberance feels more calm.

Strange that Lockheed offered the cabin in blue/grey/olive colour variants and the presumably civilian customers bought blue or grey but not olive.

Was the colour option for the cabin something offered on all Lockheed aircraft at the time to their military customers, therefore a default consideration when offering the L-1011?

Airlines then, as now, choose may of the details of the interior, including colors, finishes, seat layout, and seat types. The options you're discussing were for the flight deck only.

Advancement arguments did not entirely convince me. Autoland and "cruise control". Technically you could fit those to any aircraft. Maybe Lockheed should have done that?

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