From: kls@ohare.Chicago.COM (Karl Swartz)
Organization: Chicago Software Works
Date: 14 Oct 93 23:57:31 PDT
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>Did Lockheed get out of the commercial passenger jet
>business? When did the L1011 start rolling off of the
>assembly lines?
The L-1011 (aka TriStar) is the only commercial, passenger jet
Lockheed has produced, though they actually introduced the first
American-built passenger aircraft with jet power -- the turboprop
L-188 Electra. They've also sold a few civilian versions of the
C-130 Hercules as the L-100.
It's really a shame, because all of them are technically quite
impressive aircraft. The Electra, unfortunately, fell victim to
some early accidents and to the arrival of pure jets, which very
quickly made anything with propellors obsolete, at least as far
as the public and the marketing types were concerned.
The L-1011 feel victim to the murderous competition with the DC-10,
which drove Lockheed from the market commercial market after costing
many hundreds of millions of dollars. It's not clear that McDonnell
Douglas did all that much better with the DC-10 -- many of their
current problems are at least partly tracable to the competition with
the L-1011. Furthermore, their battle paved the way for Airbus to
enter the market.
It was particularly unfortunate that Lockheed lost the battle given
how poor a design the DC-10 was (see the newsgroup archives for many
threads on this), while the L-1011 was quite advanced for its time.
The first TriStar flew November 16, 1970. It was retained by Lockheed
for development work until being broken up in 1986. The 250th and
final L-1011 took flight just a bit over ten years ago, on October 3,
1983. It was delivered to the Algerian Government ten months later,
and now flies for the Government of Saudi Arabia.
--
Karl Swartz |INet kls@ditka.chicago.com
1-415/854-3409 |UUCP uunet!decwrl!ditka!kls
|Snail 2144 Sand Hill Rd., Menlo Park CA 94025, USA
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