First flight of the Learjet 23 prototype, the very first Learjet built.
Founded in the late 1950s by William Powell Lear as Swiss American Aviation Corporation, it has been a subsidiary of Canadian Bombardier Aerospace since 1990, which markets it as the "Bombardier Learjet Family". The 3,000th Learjet was delivered in June 2017.
Learjet was one of the first companies to manufacture a private, luxury aircraft. Lear's preliminary design was based upon an experimental American military aircraft known as the Marvel, substituting fuselage-mounted turbojet engines for ducted fan turboshaft engines. However, that preliminary design was abandoned and the final Learjet design was instead adapted from an abortive 1950s Swiss ground-attack fighter aircraft, the FFA P-16.
The original Learjet 23 was a six- to eight-seater and first flew on October 7, 1963, with the first production model being delivered in October 1964. Just over a month later, Lear Jet became a publicly owned corporation. Several derived models followed, with the Model 24 first flying on February 24, 1966 and the Model 25 first flying on August 12, 1966. On September 19 of the same year, the company was renamed Lear Jet Industries Inc.
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