Hey Aero99
If you're in California and your boss wants to fly to the east coast and/or islands, the Lear may be your plane - I would choose it over the Citation. As hawkerjet pointed out, no plane in this price range will get you coast to coast in either direction, but in my experience you’ll save a fuel stop (and several hours) over the C-550 with the Lear. I’ve flown the –20s a lot, the –35 and –55 a little, and the C-550 only a few times, so most of what I know is about the –20s; hopefully someone else will give you a better profile on the C-550.
Heading west would normally require two fuel stops in the Lear, depending on the jetstream; while the C-550 has better economy in still air, it’s significantly lower airspeed and ceiling will kill it heading west, and it will need at least one more stop – one of our owners used to fly his C-550 from NYC to SFO regularly and sometimes made four stops in the winter. His crew used to figure on arriving 10-12 hours after departure – which is an awful long time to spend in a cabin that size with his family - a year of this was enough to convince that owner to move up to a Falcon. The C-550 will generally carry more people, by the way – ours was configured for eight, versus six-seven in the –25 and four-five in the –24.
What the others have said is true up to a point – the acquisition cost of a Lear 20 will be low, but the operating cost will be high relative to other similar-sized airframes. We went shopping for a –24 about two years ago and $1,000,000 is probably still a workable number – the –25s were going for more because they’re larger. They do use more fuel than a -35 – that’s a tradeoff; but if you’re not planning on holding to the plane for more than a couple of years, you will still come out way ahead overall by going with the –20. As far as maintenance costs go, ours were negligible except at the beginning when we had to make up for some neglect by previous owners – but that will be true with most airplanes. Other than that, though, it was very reliable with no significant repairs other than an avionics upgrade; we were never AOG.
Hawkerjet brought up a good point. If you’re in SoCal, you’re in a Lear-20 hotbed – especially around Van Nuys. That’s where we ended up concentrating our search after finding most of the better airframes on the market were in that area; there are also a lot in Texas, but a lot of those have been used as freighters and are “tired”. Parts availability should be good out on the coast. The Navy is retiring the last of their CJ-610-powered airplanes, so there ought to actually be better parts availability than in years past; and some older –20 series airframes are being parted out. There’s also a strong market for the planes south of the border, where noise isn’t a concern, so the parts market is still strong.
These are “hot” planes. Contrary to their reputation, they’re not particularly fast in cruise - but they excel in acceleration and climb, because of their raw power. The thrust-to-weight ratio approaches 1:2 at lighter weights – nothing else non-military matches that. But because of their power they can really get away from a pilot – the “no-win’ scenario is a thrust reverser deployment at rotation, which is almost unrecoverable. It’s really not a plane for beginners. While it is a relatively simple airplane (Bill lear actually tried to get the -23 certified single pilot!), if you get into a –20, you really must go to sim training (which may be down to just FSI in Wichita now).
Another issue you’ll have with the –20 series Lears is noise – the CJ-610 can turn fuel and money into lots of noise, and more airports are becoming off-limits to the –20s. Tracor makes a hush kit to get the airplane to Stage III, but you have to give up the thrust reversers – none of our –20 owners thought that was an acceptable tradeoff, so they gave up access to some airports instead.
As far as flight profiles go, the –20 series Lear is one of the few jets that can climb at MTOW directly into the 40s – and really it has to - the fuel burn is 2/3 higher at FL250 compared to FL450. Once in the 40s, the range and economy become acceptable and you’re usually above the jetstream, which is crucial heading west; also, because there are so few planes above FL 410, usually you get cleared direct once your up there – which saves time and distance. The downside if you’re based near a major traffic area like NYC or LA is that ATC will hold you down for a while before you can climb, and likewise you’ll be brought down early on the way in (we used to always try to negotiate a late descent by promising the controllers an aggressive rate).
What you really need to do is sit down with your business partner, and take a look at what he really wants in an airplane. I went through this with my boss when we upgraded out of a Lear 25 – he wanted three things in a plane – an enclosed lav, standup headroom, and coast-to-coast range; and of course he had an approximate price limit. When we evaluated his flying pattern though, we found that the farthest west he’d ever been to that point in the Lear was a single trip to Las Vegas; other than that his trips never went west of the Great Lakes. In his case we compromised on the coast-to-coast range, figuring that one fuel stop on the occasional trans-con was an acceptable trade off to open a wider range of planes in his price category.
You need to do the same with your partner – find out what he really wants in his plane, what he’s willing to compromise on, and how much he’s really willing to spend. For example, if his profile is mostly local flying, the King Air is an option with charters and/or airlines to get to the east coast and the islands – but a few of those would make up for the price differential quickly, so if he goes east frequently, the King Air is out. You may also find that once he has own plane he’ll start flying more than he planned – we had another owner that didn’t plan on flying more than 750 or so miles from home, so we went for a C-550 with him. Unfortunately, he loved the convenience of his own plane and eventually ended up flying coast-to-coast and throughout the Caribbean from the northeast, which made the C-550 impractical. It’s hard to know what your partner will do once he has a plane, but you really need to sit him down and try to find out.
And if you can, get over to Van Nuys and talk to some of the pilots flying –20s. Clay Lacy still flies them, and there are others – we test flew a couple of –24s out there when we were looking.
There is a crew manual that has performance numbers, but I no longer have a copy. Here are some numbers from the last six months I flew –25Ds (I don’t have anything going back further). Based on actual flight times (as opposed to block times):
Fuel Burns:
First Hour – 2400 lbs (360 gals)
Second Hour – 1500 lbs (230 gals)
Third Hour – 1300 lbs (200 gals)
For a total of 5200 lbs – with a total capacity of about 6000 lbs (depending on the specific plane), there is no fourth hour. With the first hour burn, you can see that the plane uses a lot of fuel just getting to altitude. Because of this, and unlike a –35, all five tanks are filled almost every flight (the fuselage tank carries about 1300 lbs and is essentially what gives you the third hour.) This is inconvenient because it can’t be filled directly, and using the plane’s pumps to transfer takes just under twenty minutes, and a GPU to save the batteries.
For comparison, on average our last –25D burned an average of 315 gal/hour on all trips, while our C-550 burned 200 gal/hour. When you correct for the difference in speeds, it’s a little closer, but the –25D will still burn about 20% more per mile flying in still air.
However, if you’re flying against the jetstream, the differences are less – with a 100 knot jet in the winter the specific range (miles per gallon) of the –25D and C-550 are within a few percent of each other, and if the –25D climbs above the jetstream it’s specific range is actually better than the C-550. Eastbound, the numbers swing back further in favor of the C-550, but with it’s greater speed the Lear pilot can pull back the power and still make good time. Unfortunately, with straight non-bypass engines, that doesn’t save much fuel, but it does help.
In terms of absolute range, our longest flights were all about 1050 nm against the jetstream and flying out of NYC (i.e. kept low); with the wind, you could plan slightly longer legs. 430 KTAS/0/78M is a good number in the 40s at ISA.
Takeoff and landing speeds are actually pretty low – less than the Saab that I fly now. At MTOW, ISA, SL our takeoff distance was 4000 ft and our landing distance at MLW was 3000 ft. At Aspen on a hot day it would take about 7000 ft. for takeoff and 3500 ft for landing. These numbers vary a little depending on the actual plane as there were several different wings on the –25Ds, each with slightly different numbers.
I didn’t save any of our operating expense data when I left, but I can tell you that after some initial “growing pains” when we first got the aircraft, we had almost no expenses outside of normal wear and tear (lights, tires, etc.) with one exception – the starter-generators. The brushes wear quickly and have to be replaced religiously, and the units themselves go out for maintenance fairly often – we actually bought a third so that we could swap them instead of grounding the airplane while they were being rewound. Someone already posted the Conklin & De Decker link – if you’re going to look at one of these planes you also need to find out when all the major overhaul items are coming up – again the airframe is relatively cheap but you can get eaten alive by a hot-section teardown.
