It was Bombardier that called it a day on Lear. The first light private jets built and one of the first private jets entirely for civilian use as the Saberliner, Falcon 10/20, Jetstar and others were built for the military initially and then sold to the civilian market. Bill Lear was a hands on engineering genius and aviation hero. The company had expanded considerably (even selling parts for the space shuttle's main engine) and was very successful.
Personally, I remember when I was around 7 or 8 years old and my father took me up in one of Motorola's Learjets that had just received maintenance from him. The pilots were feeling a little feisty that day and after requesting permission from ATC shot up almost vertically in the sky. That same flight they decided to take it up to 50,000 feet just for fun as well... I remember seeing how dark the sky was and the curvature of the Earth from that altitude. Not many jets, let alone private jets were capable of this.
Later on, I also worked around some of the first Learjets, the 23 and 24, and was amazed at their performance 30 years later. Their straight engines were rockets that would outperform most modern jets to this day.
I also managed and chartered a Lear 36 (the two back seats were removed and replaced with fuel tanks) for a famous Hawaiian lawyer that, with the right winds, would fly from California to Hawaii and back... no other light jet could do that for decades (until other Learjets like the 45 and 60 came along).
I also managed several Lear 35's, 55's, and 60's that were the backbone of American private aviation for decades.
Bombardier's acquisition of Lear in 1990 killed the Learjet. When almost every single private jet company that pushed new products in the US flourished with expanding larger platforms (Citation, Raytheon, Beechcraft, Gulfstream, etc) Bombardier allowed Learjet to slowly die as they didn't properly fund them and wouldn't allow them to encroach on their larger jet line that was continually getting smaller and smaller.
Bombardier attempted to make the Lear larger without encroaching on their product line, but they failed miserably. It seems that every new product line was just a stretch of the old. Let's look at the aircraft that Bombardier allowed Lear to produce... The Lear 60 was just built on the same wider Lear 55 platform built by Lear in the 80's. The Lear 45 was a modern stretch of the older Lear 35 series and many thought the fuselage was far too narrow for such a modern and long platform. The Lear 85 was the only floor up, innovative new product that Bombardier allowed in its 30 years holding Learjet- and it came out when the market was over saturated with similar aircraft from Raytheon, Citation, Embraer, and yes, even Bombardier had the Challenger 300 that it competed with. It was a failure partly because of the market, but mainly because Bombardier funded and promoted it half-assed.
Then we have the Canadair Challenger, The CRJ, and the Global Express platform,
which all were derived from the original Bill Lear concept. This may be a bad interpretation of Bombardier, but I've always seen them as a company that buys innovative aviation companies and platforms.... stretched them, incorporates new technologies and avionics in them, and plays them out until they die. Lets look at the Challenger.... originally a Canadair Challenger, Bombardier acquired the company and continued the same exact airframe for decades with few changes. A company that I used to work for bought a Challenger 605 around 2010- almost exactly the same airframe as the original Canadair Challenger from the 70's but with better engines, avionics, etc. As stated the CRJ and Global Express was a stretch of the same design. In the last 20 years we have seen an explosion of new aircraft from Bombardier such as the CL 300 and a few others. But it doesn't change the fact that Bombardier's primary business model had been to acquire and stretch old airframes with new bells and whistles.
This is the story of how Bombardier slowly choked out one of the most innovative American aviation companies.
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Fumanchewd /forum/images/avatars/gallery/first/default.png offline on 13 Feb 21, 17:07, edited 2 times in total.
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