The Learjet era ends with a final delivery
flyingmag.com
flyingmag.com
He replied: "I told Bill Lear he was an asshole."
He replied "I did."
Never got that gig.
Did they ever ship a Learjet with an 8-track system for playing music in-flight? Wikipedia's entry doesn't mention using it in aviation, just home audio and—of course—automobiles:
> Intrigued by Earl Muntz’s four-track cartridge, Lear wanted a tape system for his Learjet business aircraft. Realizing that the aviation market was too small, Lear convinced Ford and GM to offer optional 8-track players.
Source: https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nma...
btw, many 8-track tape cartridges had "Lear Jet" embossed in the plastic like this one http://fieldwoodhs.ednet.ns.ca/slim-182dvs10584jet.jpg
Carly Simon - "you're so vain".
Edit: Rather strange downvotes? I was intending on illustrating how the Lear Jet had slipped into our culture.
The song contains a parse error in the lyrics, causing half of HN to blue screen.
“I'm in the high-fidelity first-class traveling set and I think I need a Learjet”
There’s just something about this “light” simulation. I can just go for a “simple fly in a Learjet” (hah) while doing other stuff.
FS4 had joystick support for the analogue joysticks of the time already, and dosbox properly emulates those. But the problem I ran into is the limited configuration options for the joysticks:
* "Joystick A" controls the yoke.
* "Joystick B" controls either trottle+brakes, or throttle+rudder.
Again this should be fine if you actually have a physical throttle control and can split up the two axes to different joysticks (as you're not likely to actually have throttle and rudder on the same joystick), which dosbox/dosbox-x should be able to do.
But for this "quick flying", I'm often on my laptop and using a Bluetooth gamepad with two analogue thumb sticks: https://www.8bitdo.com/sn30-pro-g-classic-or-sn30-pro-sn/
In that case, having the throttle forcibly on any thumb stick axis is terrible: Throttle adjustments are done comparatively rarely, so the self-returning nature of a thumb stick means that you're constantly having to hold the axis in the same position with your thumb. In addition, typically one stick will be fully occupied by the yoke, so the other stick will have to be throttle and rudder, which is just unnatural and weird.
I put throttle increase/decrease on buttons instead (not ideal, but works out pretty well), but unless you turn off "Joystick B" entirely, which implies also losing rudder control, FS4 can't be made to ignore the throttle axis, and will override the throttle setting with whatever the current value of the axis is. Mapping the axis to "nothing" in dosbox does not help, since that will just keep the throttle at 0.
So I spent half an hour or so dumping memory state, diffing, and single-stepping through the assembly, just so that I could patch out the instructions that set the throttle value from joystick input with NOPs, effectively ignoring it.
To do that, patch out the bytes from 0x776c to 0x7771 (inclusive) to be 0x90 (a NOP) in FS4.EXE. This is for V4.0b of FS4 specifically, but if there is a reason to use an earlier version I'm not aware of it.
The thing had a Frankenstein setup that dated way back from an older Lear and was a under-invested mess. At the time, Bombardier was throwing away all it's cash on the C-Series certification (Now known as Airbus A220). Lear85 ended up being getting cancelled so they could concentrate on C-Series.
Given the small(er) range of the 75 compared to alternatives, it's sky-roof high maintenance cost (as with any Lear) I wasn't surprised when I saw it getting canned. The only thing really going for it was high manoeuvrability and, I guess(only a guess) perhaps runway minimal length.
Nothing was left to keep the 75 competitive and with no replacement in sight... It is time to say bye bye Lear!
I had a conversation with an automotive engineer who was privy to the details who said if they'd had an inexpensive computer he thinks that they might have pulled it off. There were too many moving parts to control with analog technology.
Yet Lear's high profile failure scared off anyone from trying again to obsolete gas powered vehicles. That is until Martin Eberhardt and Marc Tarpenning came along and reinvented the electric car.
What technology is that?
To be clear, I’m not saying the light jet market is dead or anything definitive like that, but the fact that Bombardier is shutting down their well established light jet offering would seem to indicate they don’t have a rosy outlook for the segment.
The market is: very light jet, light jet, midsize, super-midsize, large, large/long range, private airliner
Bombardier is exiting the light jet market, and staying in the super-midsize, large, large/long range parts of the market.
They made it for hobby pilots that learn in the SR20/SR22 and then upgrade to the jet. It is designed to make that transition relatively easy and it is a single-engine jet so you don't need to get a multi-engine rating first.
Some of the smaller Citation jets can also be flown single pilot (like the 510), but they still require a multi-engine rating and the avionics are a bit more complex than the more straightforward switch from the SR22 to the Vision jet
Source: Article
You could be seeing such an airplane for sale.
But in general, older aircraft are safe. (For years, I flew a 1967 C182 piston single.)
Thirsty jets are selling at a discount in times when oil is expensive. Pre-COVID, you could buy an airworthy Cessna Citation for basically the value of the remaining time on the engines. They got to be worth more after that for a couple of reasons, but the cost of buying the airplane is not the last of your spending in the airplane world and especially not in the jet world.
I could easily afford to buy a clapped-out legacy Citation. I could not afford to feed and maintain a legacy Citation. It might be similar to horses in that regard, just with extra zeroes.
All the people I know who looked in the classifieds and bought themselves a supercar for peanuts then found they needed some small component replaced after a couple of thousand miles, which cost half as much as the car did.
Do make sure you look into operating costs (maintenance, insurance, fuel, etc -- and some of these are fixed costs even if the aircraft hardly flies at all) before you buy something!
The purchase price is just the start.
I guess the overhaul is roughly the same regardless of the year? There's a 1981 learjet that is roughly 600k and I see another one from 1994 at 700k. I guess you would just discount this as the airframe price?
so cool that somebody out there has done this.
From a safety standpoint, age isn’t your problem - it’s whether the aircraft has been properly maintained.
As to price, they’re cheap because they 1) have meaningful deferred maintenance liabilities (inspections, engines) 2) have high variable operating costs (fuel inefficient) 3) need upgrades (avionics, interiors) 4) maintenance volatility (could be problem free or have a $300k issue tomorrow / no maintenance service plan)
611mi (641mi flown) in 1h09m for an average speed of 531mph direct (557mph/485 knots as flown). Peak climb rate per flightaware (slightly noisy): 5781 fpm.
Thing is, if you have the gift of the gab get into politics and then you have the use of various taxpayer funded aircraft at your disposal, or make it rich, or be a head of state!
Bill Lear then sold his interest in Lear the aviation electronics company to Siegler, which had started as an HVAC company but had expanded into other areas including electronics, and the two merged giving Lear Siegler. The management of the new merged company was almost all from Siegler.
Bill Lear then started Lear the aircraft company.
I spent many many hours in front of ADM-3a and ADM-5 terminals in my undergrad days.
You know, I think I need a Lear jet