It Was the Better Airplane. It Lost by Exactly Half.
An Eastern Air Lines TriStar, the launch operator. Photo: Pete Macklin (CC BY 2.0)
Lockheed needed to sell five hundred TriStars to break even.
It sold two hundred and fifty.
That is the whole story in two numbers, and what makes it worth an episode is that almost nobody in the industry thought the TriStar was the worse airplane. Airlines liked it. Pilots liked it. It was more advanced than the thing that beat it. None of that mattered.
This is the third episode about Lockheed, a company that kept building good airplanes and kept losing anyway. It’s the one where the pattern costs them everything.
Two airplanes for one job
The rival: an American Airlines DC-10. Photo: US National Archives (public domain)
In the mid-1960s American Airlines went to the manufacturers with a requirement: a widebody smaller than the 747, twin-aisle, able to work medium-range domestic routes out of airports the 747 was too big for.
Both Lockheed and Douglas answered. Both concluded, independently, that the engines available couldn’t do it on two, and settled on three.
That should have been the warning. Two American manufacturers were about to spend a fortune each chasing a market that could support one of them.
American never meant to buy it
A TriStar in Hawaiian Air colors at Los Angeles, 1985. Photo: Pete Macklin (CC BY 2.0)
Here is the detail that made me want to write this episode.
American showed serious interest in the L-1011. It talked to Lockheed, it looked at the numbers, and it let Lockheed believe there was an order in it.
What American was actually doing was using Lockheed’s bid to push Douglas into cutting the price of the DC-10. Douglas cut the price. American bought the DC-10.
I don’t think that’s outrageous — it’s what a purchasing department is for, and Douglas made its own choice about how low to go. But it’s worth being clear about what happened. Lockheed spent real money competing for an order that was never available to it, and the competition it created is what made the DC-10 cheap enough to win everywhere else too.
The TriStar was the better machine
The L-1011 cabin in the spring of 1970. Photo: Anefo (CC0)
This isn’t nostalgia, it’s specification.
The L-1011 was the first widebody certified for Cat IIIc autoland — the aircraft flying a completely blind approach and landing itself in zero visibility. In 1972. That is a genuinely remarkable thing to have certified when the DC-10 was still a conventional airplane with a conventional autopilot.
Its Rolls-Royce RB211 engines were quieter and more economical than anything else flying, which is a large part of why the airplane’s reputation among operators stayed high for its whole career.
Its centre engine was fed by an S-duct through the tail — more complicated to build than the DC-10’s straight-through installation, and aerodynamically better.
Lockheed built the more sophisticated airplane. That is not the same as building the more sellable one.
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February 1971
An Air Canada TriStar. Photo: Pete Macklin (CC BY 2.0)
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Then the engine company went bankrupt.
Rolls-Royce had underestimated the RB211 badly — a new engine with a carbon-fibre fan, at a fixed price, on a schedule it couldn’t hold. In February 1971 the company collapsed and was taken into government ownership.
Lockheed had chosen the RB211 as the TriStar’s only engine. There was no second source, no alternative installation, nothing to switch to. TriStar production stopped.
What followed is the subject of the next two episodes, so I’ll keep it short here: the British government would only restart the engine if it could be sure Lockheed would survive to buy them, and the US government ended up guaranteeing $250 million of Lockheed’s bank loans to make that true. It went through Congress by the narrowest margin imaginable, over serious objections — including from the then governor of California, Ronald Reagan.
Six months, and it never came back
The DC-10 first flew on August 29, 1970. The TriStar first flew on November 16, 1970 — eleven weeks behind, which is nothing.
The DC-10 entered service on August 5, 1971. The TriStar entered service on April 26, 1972, roughly six months later than Lockheed had promised.
Eight months of head start, in a market with two nearly identical products, decided it. Airlines that needed capacity in 1971 bought the airplane that existed in 1971. Fleets are self-reinforcing: once a carrier has DC-10 crews, DC-10 spares and DC-10 simulators, the next order is a DC-10 whatever the brochure says.
Lockheed never made up that ground, and TIME put it plainly at the time: airlines found the TriStar reliable and efficient, and it made no difference.
The number
A Cathay Pacific TriStar at Kai Tak, 1986. Photo: Pete Macklin (CC BY 2.0)
Two hundred and fifty TriStars were built. Three hundred and eighty-six DC-10s were built for airlines.
Neither number was enough. The DC-10 didn’t save McDonnell Douglas either — I spent eight episodes on that — but it lost less, and losing less is what decided which company stayed in the business.
In December 1981 Lockheed announced it would stop. Chairman Roy Anderson said there was “no other choice.” The company had lost 2.5 billion dollars on the TriStar since 1968, and 199 million in 1980 alone, on a program that made up about eighteen percent of its revenue.
The last TriStar was delivered in 1984. Lockheed never built another airliner.
What I think this episode actually proves
The comfortable version of aviation history is that better airplanes win. This is the clearest counter-example I know.
The TriStar lost for reasons that had almost nothing to do with its quality: a customer that was using it as a bargaining chip, an engine supplier that went bankrupt, and eight months of delay in a market where being second was fatal.
And here’s the part I keep turning over. Lockheed’s decision to pick the most advanced engine available is exactly the decision you’d praise in any other story. It’s why the airplane was good. It’s also the single choice that destroyed the program, because it left them with no alternative when Rolls-Royce failed.
Being ambitious about the engineering and being exposed to one supplier were the same decision.
What are your thoughts — was choosing the RB211 a brilliant call that got unlucky, or a risk Lockheed should never have taken with no second source?
Next episode goes inside February 1971: how Rolls-Royce managed to bankrupt itself building the best engine in the world.
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Related: How Douglas lost the jet age — the same competitor, an earlier round.
Sources
- Catch a Falling TriStar — TIME, December 21, 1981 (the 2.5 billion dollar loss, the 1980 figure, Anderson’s statement, written the week Lockheed announced the end)
- Lockheed L-1011 TriStar — Wikipedia (250 built, first flight, service entry, the 500-aircraft break-even, American’s use of the Lockheed bid, Cat IIIc autoland)
- McDonnell Douglas DC-10 — Wikipedia (386 built, first flight August 29 1970, service entry August 5 1971)
