- [Announcer] This program was made possible by Wings Over the Rockies, educating and inspiring all people about aviation and space endeavors of the past, present, and the future.

- Hi, I'm Shahn Sederberg and this is "Behind the Wings".

In this episode, we're exploring the Learjet legacy.

- [Pilot] Okay, we've finished the turn, now climbing straightaway.

- For nearly 60 years, the Learjet came to define a new class of luxury aircraft, the business jet.

- [Narrator] No other business jet can fly that high.

- Now, the final Learjet is being assembled at the Wichita-based production facility in the aviation capital of the world.

- [Narrator] Learjet, on a world record setting flight.

- From its record-setting performance achievements to its out sized role in popular culture, the Learjet's place in history is here to stay, long after the production lines have shut down.

It's time to go "Behind The Wings".

(soft upbeat music) - Bill Lear was an entrepreneur based in California.

He wanted to build a small jet airplane.

His board of directors at California said, "No, we're not gonna do that."

So he resigned, he goes to Switzerland.

His son, who was living in Switzerland at the time, said that there was a small fighter bomber called the P-16, which is being built here in Switzerland, which the Swiss are not going to buy.

And Bill Jr. said, "I think this could be the platform for a small jet airplane."

(gentle music) - One day I got a letter from Switzerland and said, Don, if you want a job, I have one over here for you.

You can be the head of the technical group.

Cessna at that time, I was very disappointed because we were building the first business jet over there.

And Dwane Wallace came in one morning and said, "Nobody can afford a business jet except the military, and the military aren't interested in what we're doing."

So they came in and canceled the whole project.

After that, I said, "Anybody who's gonna build a business jet, that's where I'm going."

I had a wife and four children at the time, and they stayed here, and I went to Switzerland.

And when I got over there, I didn't like what was going on.

I tried to talk to these people, and they didn't like the Americans coming in there.

And so you'd walk in, and they'd lay down on their desks and cover what they were doing so you couldn't see.

I tried to supervise them, and those guys would sit there.

They were reading magazines.

One day, one of the guys that could speak English, I said, "Why do you guys just not work?"

And he says, "Well, we make drawings in ink, you know, and we have to take time, and we make a line, and then we have to sit for a while, let that line dry."

Holy cow, we're never gonna build this thing here.

So, Bill Lear finally said, "Okay."

And so he went looking, and I told him, I said, "If you come to Wichita, we know a lot of engineers, and it'll be easy to get them."

Finally, he came to Wichita.

- After the FFA P-16 Swiss fighter jet drew Bill Lear to Switzerland, he soon realized that Wichita, Kansas was the place that Learjet needed to be.

The workforce of engineers was there and ready to go.

With a big vision and a lot to prove, Learjet made the move to Wichita.

(dramatic music) - Wichita was founded in 1871, and for about the first 40 years, was known primarily for agriculture, a little bit of meat processing, and small businesses.

In the early 20th century, oil was discovered in this part of the state of Kansas.

And several people made a lot of money pretty quickly before the end of World War I.

So the flyers got together with the oil people who had the money, who provided the resources to allow that to happen.

And at one point in the 1920s, there were more than a dozen different aircraft manufacturing facilities in Wichita, Kansas.

Another reason why Wichita is the center is we are very flat out here.

So if your airplane had trouble, it was not a big deal to land the airplane, as opposed to trying to find a mountain range to go through and then land.

We have a large number of flying days, so that's important to have good weather when you're flying, particularly in an experimental airplane.

And finally, we're basically in the middle of the U.S., so that delivering an airplane to either coast was not a big deal.

So, a lot of factors kind of coalesced to provide the genesis of Learjet, which, in 1928, got the name of the air capital of the world because of the great number of small airplanes that were being built here.

- The very first business jet, when everyone told him it can't be done and no one will buy them and the perseverance, he stayed in it and kept it going.

And then to build it to such an iconic brand is, I mean, overwhelming how they did this, you know, in the times that they actually did it in, the technology and the workforce and the skills.

And they developed that in Wichita, Kansas.

- Bill Lear was a visionary and a jack of all trades.

He was an inventor, an engineer and an entrepreneur.

According to those who knew him closely, working for him was an exercise in controlled chaos.

Learjet moved quickly on its mission to create the world's first business jet.

- Learjet showed up in the sixties, but in 1958 the Boeing 707 had just come out, so people were actually being ferried around the country on jet airliners.

And Bill Lear came to Wichita, and he said to the combined Cessna and Beechcraft people, "If you guys don't build a private airplane that's a jet airplane to compete with that 707, I will."

- Bill Lear was clearly a visionary, the greatest visionary I've ever been around and spent much time with.

He was everything that anybody has ever heard about.

He was irascible, he was, he could be a son of a gun, he could be warm, he could be kind, he could be funny, he could be generous.

So he was all of those things all wrapped up.

Somebody's always asking me, "What was it like working for Bill Lear?"

And I said, "It was a number of years of the best years of my life that I wouldn't particularly wanna go through again," because he would fire somebody on Tuesday and hire him back on Wednesday.

So it was a lot of fun to be around.

But he was just a guy who saw things before anybody else saw things.

And he was ahead of his time.

- [Dave Franson] Bill Lear was a genius.

He dropped out of school in the eighth grade.

He was 13 years old.

He's pretty much on his own.

He was an orphan very early.

And he came up with an awful lot of stuff.

He was a self-trained engineer.

He had a lot of great ideas.

- Bill Lear was an incredible visionary.

He had a fire in his spirit.

And, you know, people would tell him that these inventions were never gonna happen and he couldn't do it, but Bill never gave up, and he pushed those limits.

One of his favorite quotes is, "They said it couldn't be done, and it was."

- Engineering was his long suit, that's where he spent most of his time.

Engineers talk about coming back to work in the morning, and they might have this blueprint of they were working on, and he'd be drawing all over it, and you'd see a WPL signature on it, where he told you what he wanted to change or asking you questions.

And the engineer said, "You know, if you thought about it, he was usually right."

He could just see their drawing and have an idea and improve it.

So this was a guy with an eighth-grade education, so pretty amazing story in itself.

- Well, Bill Lear was a very interesting guy, was a real genius and a really interesting person to know.

Had so many things on his mind all the time and things he was interested in, not one thing, but not even a dozen more.

- To ride with Bill Lear in an airplane was an experience.

Number one, he was type rated in the airplane at the age of 62.

And if he was in the airplane, he was in the left seat, he flew.

And if you were in the back, it was not unusual for him to back out of his seat in the left with a screwdriver in one hand and maybe a pair of pliers, dragging cable down the center aisle where the other people were tinkering with something.

Never amounted to a problem, but it was a little bit disconcerting if it was your first ride in the Learjet.

- Bill Lear came in at 5:00 o'clock one day and said, "We're gonna fly the airplane tonight."

Holy cow.

The airplane was ready to fly because we had taken it out and taxied it.

But we didn't have a lot of the systems in it yet.

I remember one of the guys that was gonna fly says, "We need parachutes," and we didn't have any, and Bill Lear said, "Well, what'd you need a parachute for?

You bring that airplane back here.

I don't want you jumping out of it."

- And they said, "It's ready."

Hank and I climbed in, taxied out the runway one four, fueled it up, and I took it off.

Got it up to 2000 feet and started wiggling it around a little bit.

We come back around to land.

Cars were lined up all along P42 with their lights on.

- All the skeptics were out.

- Yeah, the word got around.

I guess it said on the radio that the Learjet is flying.

One of the best sights I've ever seen.

- Got my video camera and took a shot of it taking off and landing.

And those videos are still around today.

You know, they made the first flight, everything worked fine, the gear came up and went down.

It was a great day.

Landed without incident.

And I remember Bill was so excited.

The next day he says, "We've gotta get this airplane painted, and we're gonna have a big press conference."

So some of those you see, those flights you see now, I took off that little eight-millimeter camera.

Flew right over the top building here.

- Learjets set a standard right away.

I mean, literally, if you were to look at the movie of the first flight of the Learjet flying over the factory, they made a low pass, and it was so fast, it was almost hard to follow the airplane.

And it maintained a tremendous record for capability, set speed records, set altitude records.

- As the first Learjets took flight, the brand name and its role in popular culture were quick to follow.

From high profile celebrities to Hollywood movie appearances, Learjet had an unconventional yet highly effective strategy to make the Learjet name synonymous with the term business jet.

Surprisingly, it worked.

- Very definitely, Bill Lear's vision was to have the name Learjet become synonymous with the term business jet.

That was the charge to his public relations people, of which I was one.

- The Lear company really worked hard to roll it out, and it became a household name.

When an airplane was flying over, people would say, "Oh, there goes the Learjet."

- It really caught on.

People would see any private jet flying, they'd say, "Oh, look, there goes a Learjet."

- They think of a Learjet.

- Everybody knew the Learjet even if they weren't in aviation.

Being out in the Hollywood area, Bill said to me one day, look, he said, "I wanna take this company public one day."

He said, "I want all the publicity we can get."

He says, "Take a phone book and anybody in Hollywood you wanna fly, just fly them.

- I had the privilege of flying a Lear 24 with Arnold Palmer.

Arnold Palmer is a tremendous athlete, natural athlete, tremendous pilot, tremendous person, and the Learjet fit his personality, go someplace fast and enjoy life.

- Elvis Presley flew in one on his honeymoon.

The Byrds, a musical group had written a song about the Learjet Carly Simon talked about the Learjet.

Frank Sinatra had one.

- With Frank and his friends who came, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Peter Lawford, things.

So, I flew them around a lot early when the Lear was a new airplane.

They loved it, and they helped promote the airplane.

- Learjet wasn't just making waves in pop culture.

It also set a host of performance records from Time to Climb to speed and high altitude records.

Learjet used its fighter jet roots to push the limits of performance.

Many of these records still hold today.

- Early On, the Learjet got the nickname of the businessman's jet just because of its high performance, flying from sea level to 40,000 feet in seven or eight minutes, which is Air Force fighter performance, its speed of 560 miles an hour.

It's an airplane that looks like it's flying 500 miles an hour, standing on the ramp.

Just the sleek design of the airplane.

- We were trying to stay ahead of the competition, trying to get the fastest, the highest, lowest, operating cost Time to Climb records, distance records, speed records, which airplanes within an envelope was capable of doing.

- It was the best airplane because they had the most performance, the most speed, ability to climb.

And a friend of mine, Jack Conroy, we were talking, I said, "Why don't we fly to New York and back in a Lear?"

So we did.

It went up really nice, because we took his kids along.

Flew from Los Angeles to Wichita, refuel.

Bill Lear was there, and his wife, Moya, and we flew to New York and had lunch with Jack Dempsey.

And then we flew to Tulsa and refueled.

And back in Los Angeles, set a record that still stands by the way, for that size aircraft 10 hours 52 minutes.

We got there well before sunset.

Jack's boys had baseball games that night, little league baseball, and we got back in time for them to make their games at 6:00 o'clock.

Little Lear was just a great airplane and do anything you wanted to do.

So it was a great day.

- Learjet was certainly an innovator when it came to creating the business jet as a new class of aircraft.

However, they also innovated on many other features that helped improve the planes performance.

You may have seen those little tips on the end of wings, they're called winglets, and Learjet was one of the first to experiment with them.

Now we'll hear from Camille Calibeo to learn more about winglets and exactly how they work.

- How do winglets work?

Some airplanes have wingtips that stick up at an angle, these are called winglets, and they do a lot of work to ensure airplane flight is as efficient as possible.

Learjet was one of the first manufacturers to experiment with winglets on their production airplanes.

As an airplane flies, the air under the wings is at a higher pressure than the air on top of the wings.

This is what generates the lift that keeps the plane in the air.

But at the tips of the wings, the high pressure air from the bottom bleeds upward into the low pressure air on the top.

This actually creates mild tornadoes of swirling air behind the wings that cause a lot of drag.

Overcoming drag takes a lot of energy, which means it takes a lot of jet fuel.

So we wanna decrease drag as much as possible.

Winglets help us do this.

They decrease the size of those little tornadoes behind the wings, thus decreasing drag and the amount of fuel needed.

But why is this important?

First, jet fuel is very expensive.

So the more fuel a plane needs, the more expensive an airline ticket could be.

Winglets reduce fuel consumption by approximately 4% to 5% per plane per year.

This might not seem like a lot, but winglets on a Boeing 767, for example, reduce fuel consumption by over half a million gallons per plane per year.

They also dramatically reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

So for a Boeing 767, this equates to reducing carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 5,000 metric tons for each plane every year.

- As far as designing and building aircraft, I think we were years ahead of a lot of our competition.

You know, we, our technology was there.

We, you know, constantly invested in the future, tried to stay up with the changing times.

- We had a advanced design department that was always looking at the scene outside, you know, there's a market niche here, a market niche there.

And do we wanna go after that?

And if we wanna go after that, can we get one of our airplanes to fit that?

And that's how the evolution would take place.

You'd find a need, and you'd go fill that need and try and do it better than the competition.

- As Learjet established this new class of airplane, the business jet, competing aviation companies, including Cessna and Beechcraft took note.

For all of Bill Lear's genius, Learjet was a relatively small company and low on cash.

Changing consumer preferences towards larger jets, and an increase in competition, would prove to be another challenge for Learjet.

With the newly established market and a new demand for business jets, the competition came, and it came fast.

- As Learjet was emerging there were three or four other aircraft being developed about that same time.

So there was this race to be first, race to be the most, to be the best.

Because of the synergy of these various corporate jet models at a time when the propeller airplanes were flying 150, 250 miles an hour, the corporate jet just plain took over and this is now basically a corporate jet industry.

There are still propeller airplanes flying, and they do a very good job, but the glamour, the pizazz of business aviation remains with the corporate jet, and Learjet has to be in the forefront of that.

It was the first.

It was the most glamorous.

It was the most talked about and sort of set the pace, I think, for the industry to follow.

Others have done a lot of great work in the meantime.

Cessna has delivered more corporate jets than anybody else.

And this, they're all made right here in Wichita as well.

But Learjet, I think people would give it the consensus that it was sort of the trendsetter.

- The Learjet factory here was delivering about, right before the downturn, about almost 70 Learjets a year.

After the downturn, that fell.

And then there were some other things going on at that time.

A lot of competitors came into that space, and there was a lean toward the mid-size and the larger jets.

With Learjet and Bill Lear, they quickly ran out of money.

So they sold to Gates, and then they sold to an investment firm, and then Bombardier bought them in 1990, kind of out of financial distress - Learjet was obviously purchased by Bombardier It was something of a distressed product at that point.

Bombardier made a good purchase.

And they ran the company through the nineties in a pretty aggressive fashion, lots of R&D money invested, and so on.

But in later years, two things happened.

Bombardier expanded the airplane products they had.

We had the Learjets, and then they had the Challenger line.

And then they started adding a stretch Challenger that they called the CRJ.

That particular model took off.

And they built hundreds of those airplanes for all sorts of airlines, regional airliners.

And for that matter, major airlines buy their airplanes in fleets.

So you had production that was stretching out years.

I think it spread the situation at Bombardier so thin that they had to start looking at ways to consolidate.

- It's been a struggle for almost 60 years, and it looks like the end is about to come here in 2021, and it's too bad because it is the end of an era.

The industry will go on, it will continue to thrive and succeed, but without the Learjet brand as emerging as one of the preeminent airplanes being produced and delivered.

- Makes me really sad.

Seemed like everybody that owned the place, they're always, seem like short on cash.

So you struggled.

I saw such a great future for this company.

- Sad for us to learn this year that Bombardier had made the decision not to continue to make Learjets.

They still have a few on the assembly line right now, and they'll continue deliveries to the end of this year, 2021.

But Bombardier made a decision, internally, that they just weren't selling enough of them to keep the production line going.

And they are really focusing on the larger airplanes where they make a lot more money, and so forth.

I suppose it could be resurrected at some point.

We're sad to see it, but there's still thousands of Learjets out there in the world that are flying and serving their customers every single day.

They have been used extensively in air ambulance transport.

And that particular airplane that we had and operated for a number of years, it sits in front of Wings now, was used early on in the air ambulance business to carry people who had a serious injury or had a life-threatening type of illness and needed to get to Denver, Colorado, maybe from an outlying place to get higher level of care.

They still proved to be a very viable airplane, even in today's world with the economics that we all face.

40 and 50 years old that are still flying every single day.

- The Learjet legacy will always live on and retain its name as the cache of the world's first private business jet.

- It set the standard for performance for speed.

That very first little seed that Learjet planted has grown into all the business jets in the world right now.

The Learjet is the granddaddy of all of them.

And it's a tremendous performing wonderful little airplane.

- The production side is going away, but Learjet isn't going away.

Bombardier has a program that says, bring your jet home.

- The support of our service center to bring aircraft back in.

Our operators absolutely love the plane.

So bring them back in, refurb them.

- The team is very engaged and they're all in.

There, you know, they wanna you know, get all the way to the end, and build the last unit.

- Even though they will stop making Learjets brand new the end of this year, I think we'll continue on for many, many years.

That Learjet name and Learjet legacy that Bill Lear started back in the 1960s is still felt by all of us today.

- An icon of the industry, a pace setter in the industry.

It created a whole segment of the marketplace.

- I can't imagine my life without the Learjet.

Important time of my life, learning the business, learning how to conduct myself as a professional, and to be at the center of the business jet industry with the leader of the business jet industry, almost too much to hope for.

And we had a great time doing it.

- Even after the last Learjet rolls off the assembly line, the airplanes and their impact on aviation remain.

From Bill Lear's vision to create the first business jet to its rise and popular culture and record-setting performance achievements, Learjet forever shaped the landscape of modern-day aviation.

Learjet production may be shutting down, but its name and its legacy are here to stay.

(upbeat music)