Words by Dionysis Nanos
Here’s a cold truth. Running a business is easier than people want you to think it is. You give what the consumers want at a reasonable price both for them and for you and before you know it you have a profit. Now that is great and all but there’s an issue here. The market keeps changing. One moment you’re offering something so hot, customers are rushing to get it quicker than the US rushes to an oil reserve in the Middle East and the other you have something no one wants cause something new is out, as it normally happens. Yes the world is a cruel place I know. So what do you do? Do you follow what the competition is doing? I mean that would give you sales but it would also make the competition laugh while they’re on their way to the bank. So you try the other option, which is riskier yes, but at the same time the world wasn’t built by scared snowflakes, and you decide to innovate. You look ahead and maybe see something others don’t, and maybe by some miracle you’re right and you become not only the current hot thing but the next one too. That’s what McDonnell-Douglas and Lockheed thought in the late 60s and well.. the results were interesting.
First of all, the definition. A trijet is a plane with three engines, with two of them on the wings and most likely the third one on the rear. The whole idea of the trijet was a result, weirdly, of the beloved 747. See, the big jumbo jet with its four engines was the absolute queen of the skies when it came to long haul flights, but sadly not every flight is from one continent to the other. Quickly companies like Lockheed and McDonnell-Douglas, and later even Boeing, realized that you would need something that could sacrifice some of its passenger carrying abilities for more efficiency, while most importantly targeting the highly competitive medium to long haul flight market. And since four engines were too many and two engines were too little, three engined planes became a common site in airports across the globe for many many decades (and still are to a certain extent).
Even the fathers of the jumbo jet, Pan Am, couldn’t resist the trijet.
And in general, the planes were successful at what they were built to do. They carried less people than 747s but were more efficient. So well done, good job, top of the class, end of article. But there are reasons why you haven’t seen a new trijet in the better form of fifty years now (unless you count the MD-11 as a “new” plane. It was a redesigned DC-10 come on…). First of all, as with anything new, there were problems with the design. Well, I say that, not every trijet was a death trap. The Lockheed L-1011 was a very safe and highly advanced plane, but oh you wish McDonnell-Douglas could say that about the DC-10. It was cheaper than the L-1011 and launched before it too so it had a quicker start to the market than its rival. But a design flaw with its cargo doors meant that they could just explode at any moment, like a twenty year marriage where the trust is hiding somewhere behind the fake laughs and the real tears. With DC-10s dropping out of the sky at an alarming rate people simply couldn’t trust the trijets, and while safety improved over the years, there was always a dark spot over the planes.
Then you also had running costs. While the planes on their own could be more efficient than a comparable 747, expenses attached to these planes were much higher. Pilots needed specific training to be ale to fly these planes, while maintenance was a hassle of its own. Take the L-1011 for example. It only used Rolls Royce engines which not only weren’t the best in terms of reliability at the time, but also due to the complex design of the plane’s rear wing which incorporated the engine in its design, mechanics needed specialist training too, which meant a bigger money loss for airlines. So while you could make money with a trijet, you needed to really make use of it to first take your money back before you thought of anything resembling profit. And also there was the problem of adaptability. The 747 had short variants, long variants and even mixed cargo and passenger versions since adapting the engine layout and wing design wasn’t that difficult. The trijet’s though, with their rear mounted engines were a pain to develop new versions for, as it wasn’t just the frame that would need to be changed. The rear wing would also have to be redesigned or else the weight distribution would make for a interesting, if not scary, last flight.
Even Boeing couldn’t resist the idea of the trijet..
So as it turns out, the concept of the trijet was definitely better than the execution. The 747 outsold both the DC-10 and its evolution, the MD-11, and the L-1011, with remaining trijets being used exclusively as cargo planes. Still though you really can’t call them failures, plus the look is very distinctive. Next to the 747, the trijets are the retro heroes we deserve and seeing one brings memories of good old times, even if you weren’t born at that time, and for that you can’t fault these planes. They’re a window to a different time, a simpler time, a perhaps better time. The trijets are here, in the minds of the people that admire them, and they are still flying high… even if the cargo doors are a bit dangerous…