Hawker Siddeley Trident

Hawker Siddeley · United Kingdom · first flew 1962 · airliner

BEA's sleek trijet of the 1960s — the first airliner to make a blind automatic landing in passenger service.

Recognition (WEFT)

W — Wings	Low-mounted, swept
E — Engines	3 × turbofan, tail-mounted
F — Fuselage	34.98 m fuselage
T — Tail	T-tail

WEFT is AircraftIQ's four-point recognition method — how it works.

Spot it by:

Three rear engines — two side pods and one fed through the fin
T-tail atop a sharply swept fin
Famously offset nose-wheel, set to one side

A trim trijet with two rear side pods and a centre engine in the fin, capped by a T-tail. Its resemblance to the Boeing 727 is famous, but the Trident is slimmer, with a more sharply swept wing and that odd offset nose-wheel.

Specifications

The Hawker Siddeley Trident has a length of 34.98 m (115 ft).
It has a wingspan of 29.87 m (98 ft).
Its maximum speed is 972 km/h (604 mph).
Typical crew: 3 flight crew.

Figures are for the representative variant described above; marks differ. See how AircraftIQ sources figures.

History

Designed by de Havilland as the DH.121 and built under Hawker Siddeley after the merger, the Trident first flew in 1962, sized tightly to BEA's specification. Its Autoland system pioneered automatic landings in commercial service from 1965, a genuine world first.

Variants

The short-haul 1C led to the longer-range 2E and the stretched, higher-capacity 3B, which added a small booster engine in the tail for hot-and-high performance. Chinese operator CAAC flew Tridents into the 1990s.

Where you'll see it

A quintessentially British airliner, retired since the mid-1980s. Preserved examples and cockpit sections survive at Duxford, the Science Museum store and Manchester — the type remains a favourite of British airliner enthusiasts.

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