Product Description

A general history of the Trident aircraft charting its evolution, experience with airlines and subsequent withdrawal. Trident was the world's first tri-jet and the first civilian aircraft certified to be able to land automatically in Cat B conditions, in a fog. Notoriously, in 1972, 118 people were killed when a BEA Trident airliner ploughed into waste ground only a few yards from the Staines bypass on the outskirts of Heathrow Airport-London. There were no survivors when the plane crashed, less than four minutes after taking off for Brussels. The impact broke the plane's spine, ripping off the tail section and sending it spinning through the air.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #76348 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-06
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

About the Author
Dr Frank McKim is a retired secondary school teacher of physics. He has written several books on aviation and physics, published by Scoval Publishing, Longmans and Pergamon.

Customer Reviews

Written for a general audience and suffers for it
Unfortunately this book is far from being the definitive history of the
pioneering Trident. Although not explicitly stated, I assume that it was
written primarily as an impulse purchase for visitors to the Trident
Preservation Society's G-AWZK and therefore aimed at a general audience
and not aviation historians.

This is perhaps best illustrated by the chapter on Autoland. Whilst offering
a Smiths Industries block diagram of the system, the author never explains
*how* it actually worked, concentrating instead on *what* it did. This
fear of diving too far into technical details that would alienate a lay
readership is also evident in the complete absence of structural information
or indeed any particular data on performance and handling.

Throughout there is an emphasis on anecdote as opposed to information and
the author comes across as being rather an outsider to the aviation scene,
as evidenced by his complete mangling of the history of British manufacturer
mergers on page 11. The author is also prone to repetition ( we learn twice
in two pages as to what differentiates a 1E from a 1C ) whilst sloppy editing
failed to catch caption errors and, even more seriously, mistakes in
variants; attempting to read the chapter regarding the Atlantic air race
just causes confusion as to how many 1Cs and 2Es were actually planned to be
involved. And the Super 3B was not based on a ( non-existent ) 2B...

The chapters on overseas users are interesting though that on Chinese use
is very sketchy. Most of the details of BEA operations have been covered
before and in a more logical manner by Phil Lo Bao.

This book probably fulfills its purpose as a museum momento but offers
little for the aviation enthusiast.

dissapointing
Im a huge fan of the Trident and eagerly awaited this book. It proved a dissapointman with only scant coverage of the aircraft in production and little information about the aircrafts history in service. Artwork and photos were of poor quality and the book is a huge dissapintment and doesnt do justice to such a superb aircraft as the Trident.

Trident: A History
A highly detailed well written factual book. Superb illustrations and very easy to read.

As the book's not too technical, I would recommend it to anyone over the age of 10 who doesn't necessarily have a detailed technical knowledge of aircraft.