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Ode to the Learjet
The first jet that I and many other freight haulers learned to fly was both a hoot and a handful. (www.bbc.com) Más...Sort type: [Top] [Newest]
I've always said to myself that I would NEVER ride in one - the residual affects of having lost our good family friend Richard Koret in 1965 to a Lear accident at Palm Springs. Then again, I've spent many a happy hour riding an MU-2 - another aircraft known for some handling issues. Older and wiser, if anyone wants to give me a Lear ride, I'm game! It is a classically beautiful bird.
To my eye nobody has ever built a sexier line of biz jets.
I have flown the Lear 23,24,25,31,35 and 45. My personal favorite is the Lear 24. It flys just like the T-38...same engines CJ 610/J-85 minus the burner cans.
I worked for a radio pioneer named Bill Brennan. He was a personal friend of Bill Lear, being an engineer and possessing a similar mind. He hand-built radio transmitters across the south and owned four 50,000 watt radio stations in Florida, Alabama and Tennessee. He owned one of Bill Lear's first jets and flew it himself. When he flew me, a 20 year old radio neophyte, from Montgomery, Alabama, to Jacksonville, Florida, I was sold and went to work for his station, WAPE-AM, in Jax. I flew one or two more times on the jet before, sadly, Mr. Brennan, attempting a second night landing at Daytona Beach, crashed the plane and died. If Bill Lear was anything like Bill Brennan, wow! I still love the Lear Jet and fly on them every chance I can.
Bill Lear was one of the worst bidness men in history, but he was an inventor extraordinaire. Read "A Stormy Genius, The Bill Lear story" for an incite into that mind.
You mean "insight"?
Yep.