Learjet

~ the obit ~

William Powell Lear had already made his money on car radios and the eight-track cartridge when he decided the world needed a jet small enough for six people and fast enough to embarrass airliners. He set the company up in Switzerland in 1960, then moved the whole thing to Wichita, Kansas in 1962 because that was where you could actually hire people who knew how to build aircraft. The Learjet 23 first flew on 7 October 1963.

The design borrowed its wing from a Swiss ground-attack fighter project, which tells you most of what you need to know about how it flew. It climbed like something with a military lineage and it was unforgiving in the way aircraft of that generation were unforgiving, and it was also the first business jet that a company could buy without hiring an airline's worth of infrastructure around it. Over the following six decades the factory in Wichita delivered more than 3,000 aircraft, running from the 20-series of the 1960s through to the 70/75 that closed the line. More than 2,000 of them are still in the air.

The strange part of the Learjet story is the name. Within a few years of the first flight, "learjet" was doing duty in newspapers and song lyrics as the ordinary word for any private jet regardless of who made it, the way "jeep" or "thermos" made their own escapes. That is the only version of this product most people ever had, including me. The distance here is not geographic and not generational, it is that the aircraft was always a business tool bought by charter fleets and corporate flight departments, so the name traveled everywhere the object never went.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how the market moved ~

Bombardier bought Learjet in 1990 and for a long while the light-jet line sat comfortably underneath the Challenger and, later, the Global series. Then the money in business aviation drifted upward. Buyers who wanted a small jet increasingly wanted a cheap one, which meant the very light jet category and eventually the Cirrus Vision and the Embraer Phenom, while buyers with real budgets wanted transatlantic range and a cabin you could stand up in.

Learjet was squeezed from both ends. The 85 program, an all-composite clean-sheet design that was supposed to reset the line, was suspended in 2015 after Bombardier had already spent heavily on it, and that was the point where the brand stopped having a future product. What continued for another seven years was the 70/75 selling into an installed base of loyal operators.

~ the last one out of wichita ~

On 11 February 2021 Bombardier announced it was ending Learjet production entirely, as part of a restructuring that cut thousands of jobs and refocused the company on its larger aircraft. Production ran on until the order book was clear. The final aircraft, a Learjet 75 Liberty, was handed over on 28 March 2022 to Northern Jet Management of Grand Rapids, Michigan, which had been buying Learjets for decades and took this one as the 24th in its fleet. They had also taken the first and last Learjet 70, which means one charter operator in Michigan collected a suspicious number of the line's bookends.

~ what came after ~

Bombardier kept the Wichita site as a service center, so the address survived the product. The fleet is large enough and the airframes durable enough that Learjets will be flying long after anyone remembers which company built them, which is the same thing that happened to the word.

Lear himself did not live to see any of it. He died in May 1978, having spent his last years on the Lear Fan, an all-composite aircraft with a pusher propeller that his widow kept funding after him and that never did reach certification.

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