The Tragedy of the Tristar

In the history of aviation, there are only a few planes that were both ahead of their time and, at the same time, total commercial failures. The Lockheed L-1011 Tristar was one of them.

The strange thing about the Tristar is that it did everything right. It was technologically ahead of its competitors. It had better safety systems, better flight controls, a quieter cabin, and was famously reliable. Pilots loved flying it. Passengers liked being on it. And yet it lost. It sold poorly and eventually disappeared. Why?

One answer is timing. The jet engine that Lockheed picked — the RB211 from Rolls-Royce — turned out to be both a marvel and a catastrophe. Rolls-Royce went bankrupt trying to finish it, and Lockheed's production line ground to a halt. By the time they recovered, McDonnell Douglas had already gotten their competing plane — the DC-10 — into the hands of airlines. In a business where scheduling routes and delivering planes on time defines profit margins, that was enough.

Another answer is that being good doesn't matter as much as being first. The DC-10 got the early orders from airlines that needed to upgrade their fleets quickly. The Tristar, being late by even a year or two, never got the same momentum. And airplanes are one of those weird kinds of products where momentum matters a lot. Once an airline buys a plane, they commit to decades’ worth of maintenance contracts, pilot training, and spare parts. It’s not just a purchase — it's a new language they have to learn. The harder that language is to learn and support, the less likely they are to adopt it, no matter how good it is.

But what really made the Tristar tragic was how far it pushed the envelope in ways that no one asked it to. It had the first fully automatic landing system certified for zero visibility. It had a direct lift control system that made landings smoother and safer. It had better cockpit visibility. It even had recessed cabin doors to reduce drag. It was quiet enough that some airports dropped curfews just for it. And yet, none of that made a difference when showing up late.

There’s a kind of lesson here if you squint. We tend to think the best tech wins. That if you build a better mousetrap, the world beats a path to your door. But the Tristar was a better mousetrap, and the world didn't care. At least not enough.

It’s easy to imagine a parallel universe where it worked out. One where Rolls-Royce delivered the RB211 on time, Lockheed hit the market first, and everyone agreed the whisper-quiet plane with its sci-fi cockpit and auto-landing system was the obvious winner. But we didn’t get that one. We got the one where the inferior plane sold better, and the Tristar ended up fading away.

For people who love planes, the Tristar is still remembered fondly. There are a few left, doing odd work like launching rockets from the upper atmosphere. But mostly it's a ghost — a kind of flying what-if.

There’s probably a Tristar in every field. The product that was clearly better but didn’t win because it wasn’t first, didn’t have the right backers, or didn’t make the right compromises. Being right isn’t enough. Sometimes you also have to be lucky.