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Aviation History
1977
1977 - 1747.PDF
fUOHT International, 4 June 1977 1655 Lockheed TriStar 500 Lockheed's long-range TriStar, the L-1011-500, is due for roll-out in August of next year, with a first flight two months later. First deliveries are planned for April 1979, but the 500 is already an increasingly important con tender in the 707/DC-8-replacement market. BILL SWEETMAN and JOHN MARSDEN visited Burbank to prepare this, the first illustrated technical and market report on the new long-legged Lockheed LOCKHEED finance and Rolls-Royce power have between them paced the development of the TriStar. The latest •member of the family, the TriStar 500 is a minimum- risk, lowest-cost development of the airframe. With its RB.211-524B powerplant it represents a far greater increase in performance without major changes than any one believed possible in 1970. The TriStar 500 will have been in full development for a year in August, and it is already as available to customers as its more mature competitors. That is to say, the 500 can be delivered within the 18/24-month lead time normal when an airline is introducing a new type. British Airways' launch order last August was crucial to the TriStar 500 programme. If Lockheed was trying to sell the project today, most of the prospective customers who said in 1976 that it was too early to make a decision would now be telling Lockheed that the TriStar could not meet their timetable. But the TriStar 500 was launched by British Airways and can now be offered for delivery as soon as 1979. It steps into the long-haul market nine years behind the Boeing 747, five years behind the McDonnell Douglas DC-10-30/40 and three years behind the 747SP. What has it got that the others haven't? Probably the biggest ace up the Lockheed sleeve is the fact that TriStar 500 was conceived in A.D. 1975, which for airline managers is Year Two A.F.C. (After the Fuel Crisis). The unexpected rise in oil prices combined with a routine cyclical recession cut back estimated traffic growth rates from 1974 right through the 1980s. This was a very long-term effect because it covered most of an amortisation life and demanded planning action which went a long way beyond delaying a few deliveries or holding back on a few options. Nowhere was this trend more marked than in long-haul fleet planning. The one-type long-haul fleet—the 707/DC-8 fleets of the late 1960s—was clearly a thing of the past. Recession had stretched out to infinity the growth curves that should have turned narrow-body routes into 747/DC-10 markets, and the noise regulations formulated in the early 1970s, when traffic growth seemed sure to retire the narrow- bodies anyway, were beginning to close in. Lockheed-California director of commercial marketing Stu Smith takes up the story: "Our market research showed that there was an emerging market for a 707 replacement. If you take the present capacity and project the growth rates you need an aircraft with the same range and larger capacity." By the autumn of 1975, Smith explains, "we had felt for some time that there was a market out there, compounded by the need to develop non-stop service and increase frequency." Lockheed took the first TriStar 500 brochure around the airlines in the second half of 1975. "We found that British Airways was fairly interested and we began to home in." The TriStar 500, it almost goes without saying, is not unlike a DC-10-30/40 with fewer seats. But Lockheed has been in DC-10-30/40 country before, with the L-1011-8 project of the late 1960s, and the 500 is 14 per cent smaller than the DC-10 in the most vital statistic of all: aircraft- mile cost. Lockheed's crisis and the cancellation of the 50,0001b- thrust RB.211-61 killed the Dash 8, which would have been Now complete at Burbank is the engineering mock-up of the TriStar 500 fuselage, modified from the original TriStar mock-up. It will be used to check out systems plumbing in the shorter body
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