A fighter nobody wanted

In the late 1950s the Swiss government abandoned the FFA P-16, a single-engined ground-attack fighter built at Altenrhein on Lake Constance, after two of the prototypes crashed in testing. Most people saw a failure. An American inventor saw a wing. Bill Lear liked the P-16’s wing, with its distinctive tip tanks, and its landing gear, and in 1960 he moved to Switzerland and founded the Swiss American Aviation Corporation to turn the fighter into a small twin-engined passenger jet. The world’s most famous business jet began as a Swiss warplane.

The man who invented the car radio

Lear was already rich and famous, without a single aircraft to his name. Born in Hannibal, Missouri, in 1902 and largely self-taught, he had built a B-battery eliminator, developed the car radio and, in 1964, the same year his jet entered service, the 8-track tape cartridge. Over a 46-year career he received more than 140 patents. What he saw in the P-16 was a gap in the market: a fast, small jet for business travellers.

Wichita, 1963

Switzerland was too slow for him, his son said later, and in 1962 the tooling moved to Wichita, Kansas, where the city offered a $1.2 million industrial revenue bond. Assembly began on 7 February 1963 and the SAAC-23, now the Lear Jet 23, flew on 7 October 1963. The prototype crashed in June 1964 when a pilot deployed the spoilers by mistake, but certification followed on 31 July and the first customer aircraft was delivered on 13 October. Only 101 Model 23s were built, yet they created a new market for fast small business jets.

Golfers, records and Gates Rubber

In April 1967 Lear sold his roughly 60 per cent stake to the Gates Rubber Company of Denver for $27 million, and in 1969 the firm became Gates Learjet. Its turbofan Learjet 35 and 36, from 1973, became the best-sellers, with 738 built, and in 1976 the golfer Arnold Palmer flew a Learjet 36 round the world in 57 hours 25 minutes, a class record. The fleet passed a million flight hours in 1974. There were dark moments too: in October 1999 a depressurised Learjet 35 flew on for hours with the golfer Payne Stewart and five others dead aboard.

The last Learjet

After a slump in the mid-1980s and a change of owner, Bombardier bought Learjet in 1990 and added the Learjet 60 and 45. The all-composite Learjet 85, launched in 2007, flew in April 2014 but was cancelled the following year. On 11 February 2021 Bombardier announced the end of production, and the final aircraft, a Learjet 75, was delivered on 28 March 2022 after 60 years. More than 3,000 Learjets had been built, and more than 2,000 were still flying. Bill Lear himself had died in May 1978.

Factories

• Wichita plant · Wichita Mid-Continent airport, Kansas — Main factory from 1962–63 to the end of production
• Tucson facility · Tucson, Arizona — Headquarters and second line 1986–1989
• SAAC works · Altenrhein, Switzerland — Original design base 1960–1962

People

• William Powell Lear · founder — 1902–1978; also developed the car radio and the 8-track cartridge
• Hank Beaird · test pilot — Flew the Learjet 23’s first flight with Bob Hagen, 7 October 1963
• Arnold Palmer · golfer and pilot — Round-the-world class record in a Learjet 36, 1976

Records and firsts

• Round-the-world class record, 22,894 miles in 57 h 25 min 42 s, Arnold Palmer, Learjet 36, 1976
• Six time-to-climb records by a Learjet 55, 7 July 1983
• First business-jet fleet to pass 1 million flight hours, 1974