I remember kid me first discovering the Learjet in a flight simulator in the 90s. I dreamed of one day being a pilot or having my own airline with a fleet of them. Sad to see them go.
Immediately thought of that as well. I still play MSFS4 from time to time in dosbox. I sat down with dosbox’s internal debugger one day and patched the .EXE so that it properly works with joysticks, and now use a Bluetooth game pad to fly the Learjet from SFO over the Golden Gate Bridge to Seattle navigating via radio from VOR to VOR every now and then.
There’s just something about this “light” simulation. I can just go for a “simple fly in a Learjet” (hah) while doing other stuff.
That sounds useful. If this isn't something you found elsewhere, please document what you did and put it up in a github gist or a pastebin or something!
Sure, it was just a small thing pertaining mostly to gamepads. If you have joysticks with an extra throttle control, or only one joystick with only two analogue axes, you can likely ignore it.
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.
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.
I've only been a passenger on a private jet once: a lightly loaded Lear 60. The takeoff was amazing; there was a fairly high level of initial acceleration and the acceleration got stronger and stronger as the airspeed built on the runway. I went up to the cockpit door early in the climb and we were climbing at over 5K feet per minute. It was obvious that the aircraft was not short on engine power. :)
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!
Its a nice corporate day out, the parachute training only takes 10mins which is keep your knees togethers, legs bent and when you hit the ground roll to your left or right but thats about it really. Its an attempt to stop bones being broken and trying to change or spread the momentum throughout the body.
> Aircraft aren’t the only thing [Bill] Lear invented. He is also known for developing the 8-track cartridge audio tape
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:
According to Smithsonian, it was originally created for use in aircraft:
> 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.
just to be precise, that doesn't actually say it was deployed in Learjets, only that it was intended to be before it was developed. I don't doubt that it was, but it doesn't say that.
The insurance that paid my Learjet ambulance ride after an accident in a neighboring country goes for a single digit rate (€), per year. I don't consider myself ultra rich.
Friend was running overland trucks in Southern Africa and same deal - a client almost lost his arm due to a croc attack and they broke out the jet to evacuate him to a hospital.
Yeah, that's clearly reaching into "better have insurance" territory. I'm not the type who is prone to take insurance for trivialities, if I drop my phone the last thing I'd want is dealing with a claims process (some people seem to enjoy that kind of stuff, trying to "win at insurance").
But in this case it was the reverse, not "buy some service, hope for insurance to accept the bill" but "tell insurance that there's a problem, let them do the rest". I'd have been glad to have that procurement problem outsourced even if they only paid for a small fraction of the bill (just big enough to make them still care for price)
I'd argue that this is a case where splitting out coverage and relying on individuals to assess and specifically subscribe to a given benefit makes little sense.
People are terrible at assessing risks. This may mean overassessing limited risks, and underassessing large risks.
Companies have a house advantage. They know the risks, and the marketing and persuasion methods. Splitting out and dividing complex risk-based goods and marketing these individually turns out to be highly profitable.
Healthcare decisions in the moment are not normal market transactions. There are any number of failures of consent, informedness, access to alternatives, asymmetry of consequences, fiducuary roles, perverse incentives, and numerous other issues.
There are tremendous variations in individual ability to pay or afford options. Regardless of individual need, in a society with highly unequal wealth and/or income, access varies tremendously.
If air transport is useful, viable, and effective, then it should be made available to all, contingent on assessed medical benefit and actual availablity. Where allocation decisions need to be made, they should not be made on a market basis.
And the consequence is precisely the surprise 5-figure-plus billings noted in the article I'd linked earlier.
If you live in the USA you’re ultra wealthy compared to middle class people in many countries. And surprise - they’ll probably really like you when they meet you, and not just because you have electricity, sanitation and running water.
I used to work for a company that had a corporate jet as a cost saving measure. They were located at a smaller market where commercial flights tended to be expensive, involve multiple hops, and require extra days of travel (and therefore hotel bills) in order to make schedules line up. It didn't make sense to fly a single person, of course, but if there were several people who needed to go to the same place at the same time, flying the corporate jet was often the less expensive way to go.
I wouldn't advise being too envious, if I were you. It was noisy and cramped. You couldn't really stand up to stretch your legs. And you had to carefully watch how much you drank due to the lack of decent bathroom accommodations. Many of my colleagues loved it, mostly for the "we're in a private jet!" factor, and I suppose a larger plane might be more comfortable, but, at least as far as that one was concerned, I personally preferred flying commercial.
Interesting that the article on Lear mentions that Lear designed the first Motorola radio for Galvin (after having sold his radio company to them for a 1/3 stake in the company), but Lear is not mentioned anywhere in the Motorola article.
This is based on something I read quite a few years ago, but IIRC, as a hands-on partner in Motorola (in its early days, he was its sole circuit designer) he led it into being an early adopter of transistors and other semiconductor devices. (If this is the basis for the quoted passage in the article then it is arguably misleading, but using transistors to make compact electronic devices required innovations in circuit design, and, in general, turning new technology into useful products requires vision and innovation.)
Proper maintenance and periodic inspections lead to the eventual replacement of all parts before their failure sans the airframe, when it is typically cheaper to buy a new aircraft.
Some of the Lear models don’t meet noise regulations and need modifications to continue to be used.
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.
A properly maintained aircraft is safe at any age. However, some aircraft have fatigue life limits on either the airframe as a whole or parts that are cost-prohibitive to replace on an old aircraft, such as wing spars. Talk to your (future) mechanic, who can look up ADs (airworthiness directives) and other limitations.
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!
I heard it as: "If you're considering buying a boat, step into the shower, turn the water on, and stuff $100 bills down the drain while you get drenched. Same experience."
damn this thread single handedly destroyed all three of my dreams: owning a early 00 private jet, a 90s seaplane and 80s yacht. ALL of which were very much the focus of my day dreams!
This is typically because they have timed out engines, are due for major inspections, or require expensive mandatory modifications such as RVSM or hushkits. That said, I know someone who purchased an original Lear 24 in the low 6 figures that needed everything. He spent more than 1M, but less than 2M on overhauled and hushkitted engines, overhauling and refinishing the airframe, major avionics update including ADS-B and RVSM, and other upgrades, and now had a machine that can FAR outperform an Eclipse 550 at lower cost. https://www.newunitedgoderich.com/projects/bombardier-learje...
oh wow that thing is made in the 1966!!!! that's absolutely insane
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?
I was a kid in the 90s Los Angeles, and being somewhat familiar with jets from kids books and MSFS, is it me or does anyone else seem to remember the Learjets in the air at the time being the absolutely loudest sound they've ever heard?
[seek the advice of an expert not internet commenters when it comes to this stuff]
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)
Story time: An engineer colleague of mine at Boeing working on flight controls always talked about how great Learjets were, and how he liked working on them. I finally asked him, "if you like Learjet so much, why are you here working for Boeing?"
>Lear started designing a private jet in the 1950s. Jet aircraft were new technology, and there were many designs that never made it off the drawing board. That changed when Lear opted to adapt a Swiss ground-attack fighter, the FFA P-16, that had never been built.
They were completely separate corporate entities. Lear was an aviation electronics company and Bill Lear wanted it to become an aircraft company but the board would not agree.
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.
I think the interesting element is what it says about the market for private jets in that there isn’t a perceived market for light jets, but that the super-midsized to large cabin+ is still very viable, any thoughts on what’s driving that? Interest rates, Engine efficiency, fractional ownership, customer preference?
From a taxonomy standpoint, I think those are very light jets.
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 Cirrus Vision jet is a very different market, that's made for owners that want to fly it themselves.
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
I would guess the brand recognition is more driven by Microsoft Flight Simulator than popularity among its target market? The Source of All Truth suggests that the LearJet 70/75 hasn't been selling nearly as well as some of its competitors.
I figured it wasn't selling nearly as well as its competitors, and I could certainly could see why older designs would not be appealing any more. What I'd imagine though would be newer designs would get the Learjet brand slapped on them and do well.
I think Learjet brand name has strong connotations with old tech and early days of private GA jets. Also, there is lots of competition at this size of a/c from newer/more modern designs (Pilatus PC-24, Embraer Phenom, Cessna Citation variants) and a very limited buyer pool
Interesting. I totally get that it's a competitive market and various parties would push others out. I just figured the brand itself would be an asset that one of the surviving parties would want to use. It makes sense though that connotations with old tech would undermine the brand value.
Whenever I’m talking to a pilot who flies a Lear I refuse to pronounce the company name as anything other than “Bomb-ba-deer” cause I think it sounds super cool and I can’t pronounce anything vaguely French
Bill Lear was a genius. Of all his different inventions the one that interested me the most was his attempt to invent and launch a steam powered car. Starting in 1969 he tried for ten years and spent untold millions of his fortune. In the end though he had successes (a SF city bus) but he couldn't make the car work.
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.
A couple of years ago I worked on an avionics suite upgrade for a "state of the art" Lear flight deck destined for training (aka Full Flight Simulator in the trade).
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!
107 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadThere’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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIhey40rjks&t=1787s
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!
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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-track_tape
> 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
You know, I think I need a Lear jet
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/parenting/air-ambulance-b...
But in this case it was the reverse, not "buy some service, hope for insurance to accept the bill" but "tell insurance that there's a problem, let them do the rest". I'd have been glad to have that procurement problem outsourced even if they only paid for a small fraction of the bill (just big enough to make them still care for price)
People are terrible at assessing risks. This may mean overassessing limited risks, and underassessing large risks.
Companies have a house advantage. They know the risks, and the marketing and persuasion methods. Splitting out and dividing complex risk-based goods and marketing these individually turns out to be highly profitable.
Healthcare decisions in the moment are not normal market transactions. There are any number of failures of consent, informedness, access to alternatives, asymmetry of consequences, fiducuary roles, perverse incentives, and numerous other issues.
There are tremendous variations in individual ability to pay or afford options. Regardless of individual need, in a society with highly unequal wealth and/or income, access varies tremendously.
If air transport is useful, viable, and effective, then it should be made available to all, contingent on assessed medical benefit and actual availablity. Where allocation decisions need to be made, they should not be made on a market basis.
And the consequence is precisely the surprise 5-figure-plus billings noted in the article I'd linked earlier.
I wouldn't advise being too envious, if I were you. It was noisy and cramped. You couldn't really stand up to stretch your legs. And you had to carefully watch how much you drank due to the lack of decent bathroom accommodations. Many of my colleagues loved it, mostly for the "we're in a private jet!" factor, and I suppose a larger plane might be more comfortable, but, at least as far as that one was concerned, I personally preferred flying commercial.
What technology is that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Lear#Radio_engineer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litz_wire
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”
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)
He replied: "I told Bill Lear he was an asshole."
He replied "I did."
Never got that gig.
https://www.military.com/equipment/c-21a
Source: Article
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.
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
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.
https://driventowrite.com/2015/12/02/lear-steam-car/
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!