Listen in to hear from Bart Gray, who is leading a flight to circumnavigate the globe from pole to pole in a Learjet 36A, and Rick Rowe from the Classic Lear Jet Foundation, an organization in the midst of restoring a 1964-built Lear Jet 23, the first Learjet to be delivered to a customer.
Gray discusses the flight, which leaves April 30, including the route, preparations and challenges. Rowe, meanwhile, provides an update on the project to return the aircraft into flying condition.
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AI Transcript
Molly (00:10): Hello and welcome to this edition of today's BCA podcast. We're so happy to have you joining us. I'm Molly McMillin, managing editor for Business Aviation at the Aviation Week Network. We have such an interesting podcast for you.
Today with me are Bart Gray, founder of Jet Care and Air Ambulance provider in Brooksville, Florida. He is in Wichita preparing for an historic mission that he's going to talk about. He and his crew will take off in a Learjet 36A to circumnavigate the globe from pole to pole. Amazing. And also with us is Rick Rowe with the Classic Learjet Foundation also in Wichita. The foundation is in the midst of restoring a historic Lear Jet model 23, serial 23-03, which means that it's a 1964 Lear Jet 23 that was the first Learjet to be delivered to a customer. And there is a connection between those two, the flight and the project. So first of all, Bart, let's go to you. You have quite a mission coming up setting, going from pole to pole. Can you, let's hear about the update on that. What are you doing and how did you come up with this idea?
Bart (01:37): Well, as far as coming up with the idea, a very good friend of mine and one of our crew members on the flight, John Bone, who has done several circumnavigation in his Cirrus airplane, and he was also with us last year when we did the circumnavigation westbound and set the speed record. But John has done several of those and he has had ideas of doing a polar flight in his Cirrus. And we've been talking about this for many years and the ideas of it. And then once we did the westbound circumnavigation last year, we said, Hey, can we do this in Learjet? And we started looking at that option of doing that and putting that together. And over the past year, I think we've come up with a plan to do this. So what we're actually going to accomplish is what's called a polar circumnavigation diploma. And there's a lot of requirements to do that, but one of them is to go further than 75 south and further than 75 north, and then your equator crossing points be more than 90 degrees apart. That's the route we're going to take is to accomplish those tasks. The Learjet doesn't have quite the range to make it directly over the pole, but it'll make it into both polar regions, which will qualify for a polar circumnavigation.
Molly (02:50): And as background, a year ago, it was just a year ago that you completed a record setting westbound around the world flight and that flight raised money for this project to restore the Lear Jet Model 23. And this new flight is doing the same. Is that right?
Bart (03:11): Yeah, I've been operating classic Learjets 20 and 30 series airplanes for 25 years or so, 20 years or so. And so I've been very involved with the airplane, love the airplane. A couple years ago I got the opportunity to be part of the Classic Learjet Foundation when it was formed. And then I've always had this idea of setting a speed record around the world and also this polar one. It's always been something I've always wanted to do. So when it became a reality of something that I could actually go do, I was fortunate enough to be part of the Classic Learjet Foundation and I said, Hey, can we use this to make it a fundraiser because the organization needs funds to do what we do. So we came up with the idea of, hey, can we do this as a sponsorship and sort of like a walk-a-thon where we sponsor the distance. And so that's where the idea was formed and we said, Hey, let's do a sponsorship based thing and raise money for the Classic Learjet Foundation. So my company, Global Jet Care, we're operating the airplane and supporting the mission of the actual flight, providing the airplane and the crew and the logistics and the means to accomplish the mission. And then all of the money that we raise in sponsorships, we put logos on the airplane and then that money goes directly to the Classic Learjet Foundation to support their mission of restoring the airplane.
Molly (04:33): This is different from your other around the world trip with the poles. How do you prepare for such a flight like this?
Bart (04:43): Well, it's different in a lot of ways, but the weather is probably the biggest difference. And as far as the logistics are concerned, last year we flew westbound just north of the equator all the way around and the weather along the equator, although it can be bad, it's typically fairly isolated thunderstorms and that kind of stuff, which we can easily just usually fly around going polar region to polar region. First of all, we got to consider the time of year, so we're going to be flying into all four different seasons going on this. So as we fly south this time of year, it's going to be there, what is it there? Fall down there, and then we're going to come back to the equator and back north into the springtime up here. So the weather is going to be sort of a completely unknown as we plan this.
Bart (05:37): A lot of the airports that we are flying to have being that we're going to cross over the South Atlantic, which is a very, very remote part of the world, there's very few places to go out there. So some of the places we're going are so remote that the airports are just not available at anytime. You feel like you want to go through there. So they have very strict times that you have to adhere to go through any sort of weather delay is going to affect that pretty drastically. The logistics of this mission are fairly different from last year's mission.
Molly (06:12): How many hours will it take you and what's your planned route?
Bart (06:16): Well, the broad strokes are we leave Wichita on April 30th at 7:00 PM and we head down to Panama through Chile and then to the southern tip of Argentina. From there we leave Argentina and that's one of the longest legs of the whole mission is from Argentina to go down below 75 south and back. So we'll go straight down due south toward the pole, get down to 75 degrees south, and then make a U-turn and come back to Ushuaia in Argentina. From there we go up the east coast of Brazil across the southern Atlantic through an island of St. Helena, which is one of our most interesting stops. It's an airport that just opened in 2016, so it's a fairly new airport on an island that's been out there for a long time. So we'll go from there up to the western part of Africa through Morocco up to London, and then our farthest north point up to Svalbard in Norway, which is going to be one of our farthest northern stops. And then from there back down through Canada and back into Wichita.
Molly (07:20): Wow, that's a lot of flying. How many hours of flying do you think that's going to be?
Bart (07:25): We're estimating somewhere between 58 and 60 hours of flying. Last year our westbound record I think was about 57 hours. I think this will be about two, three hours, about a thousand more miles on this route than our route we did last year. Plus we were all in a headwind last year. So this year we'll see how the winds affect us, but we're not going due west at all. So hopefully we're a little better speed.
Molly (07:50): And how big is your crew?
Bart (07:52): We have a crew of four. So four all type rated PIC guys on the Learjet.
Molly (07:59): You had some special permissions you had to do to fly the Antarctica route, is that right?
Bart (08:06): Every country has some sort of process for overflight. Some of it's really simple, just follow a flight plan and that's good enough to meet the ICAA requirement over that country. Some of them are application forms, some of them take a day to do, some of them take a week to do, but every country has their own process and you just follow that process. Antarctica is a little different because it's not owned by anybody. It's actually a treaty area. So it's a landmass that countries have signed a treaty to have access to, the United States being one of those countries that signed the treaty. So we have access to use Antarctica and land on it and fly over it, but it's controlled by the State Department. So one of the guys on our crew, John Bone, he sort of headed up that to get that permission to Antarctica.
Bart (08:56): And it's an interesting process. You can't just say, Hey, I want to go to Antarctica because I think it'd be really cool and that's what I want to do. You have to have kind of a reason why you want to go there and to explain yourself of what you're doing. And just recreational someone is not necessarily enough. So it starts actually with the National Science Foundation. So we talked with them and submitted ideas to them of some sort of scientific reason. We wanted to have access to Antarctica, and I can explain that in a minute, but they give us permission and say, okay, this sounds like a legitimate reason to go. And then it kicks it over to the EPA and the EPA has to evaluate what you're going to do and what impact you're going to have on the environment and the animals and that kind of stuff. And so we submit all of our plans for that and then there's some insurance stuff that has to be done, and then eventually it goes back to be reviewed and then we get permission. So that has taken at least six or seven months of effort we put into that and finally got the letter for the approval to go over the region.
Molly (10:04): And you'll be doing a science project on the way?
Bart (10:08): Yeah. I mean, I use the word we by no means scientists, but we have to come up with a reason and do something. So I sort of use the internet to kind of come up with an idea of what we could do and what we came up with was, which is very interesting, the earth being sort of not a perfect sphere, sort of flat at the poles and bulge to the equator, puts the equator regions further from the center of the earth than at the polar regions. So at the polar regions you should have increased amount of gravity, and this is by no means anything. We're proving it's sort of a known thing, but we're going to use some of those predicted equivalent gravity models to sort of predict the change in weight of things. So we have a scale on board, we have just a little mobile microgram scale, and we have a couple of standard weights that we bought, and we're going to take weight readings on those weights as we fly and as we make those stops and hopefully we leave Wichita and we see those weights get slightly lighter as they get to, as they're affected by less gravity as they get to the equator, and we'll see them get heavier as we get to the pole and so on and so on.
Bart (11:26): So we'll take the readings the whole way and when we get back, look at the data and see if it all makes sense. So like I said, I have contacted our local college in Florida where I am and talked to some physicists there who know way more about this than me, and so I said, I'll go collect the data and then you guys show me what I actually found out.
Molly (11:50): Sounds good. And Rick, you've been waiting patiently. Can you give us a quick update on this historic project and kind of where you are in the process?
Rick (12:01): Yeah, sure. Thank you. So the project came about in February of 2022 when Dick Kovich, a retired Learjet engineer, got a call out the clear blue sky from a gentleman named Don Rounds, who was the previous owner of 23-03 saying, heard you guys are interested in buying a Learjet. Dick said, well, didn't know that. So to make a long story short, Dick started talking to some of the engineers and mechanics around Learjet and they decided that this might be something to take a look at. So they went to Bartow, Florida where the airplane was sitting in July of 2022. Gave it a good once over, looked at it and deemed it a viable candidate for restoration. In August of that year, they formed a committee that was looking at that Classic Learjet Foundation was formed then in August of 2022 and became a nonprofit 501(c)(3) entity. By December of that year, the airplane was trucked back to Wichita and arrived in Wichita February of 2023. The project was on hold while it was in storage and waiting for a long-term hosting agreement until last year in October when we really started getting into it and we're able to start working on the airplane.
Molly (13:23): So just real quickly, unfortunately we're running out of time, but where are you in the process, Rick?
Rick (13:31): So in the process, what has to be done is we have to completely dismantle the airplane, which is just about complete. Then we have to get it inspected and x-rayed to find out what the situation really is with the airplane. Then we can create a serious timeline as to how long it's going to take us on the project. Right now we're working on a notional timeline that tells us it's going to be about three years to have the airplane flying again as a living flight history piece.
Molly (14:05): So your goal is to get it to a flight condition.
Rick: Yes, yes. Our goal is to fly it to or restore it to flying condition.
Molly: And what's your biggest challenge today on that?
Rick: I think, I'll tell you, I think the biggest challenge is going to be fundraising. We don't know how much it's going to cost yet until we get all these inspections and x-ray and all that sorted out and then we'll be able to put the timeline, put the fundraising goal out there and get going and ready to fly it.
Molly: Well, if someone wants to find out more about it or where do they turn?
Rick: We have a website called classic lear.org. There's a lot of history on there and they can help us by donating on that website. Find the donate button and you can use credit cards and you can do monthly donations. Set it up as a regular donation every month or single donation, just donations as they see fit.
Molly: Alright, well unfortunately we're out of time, but we're going to follow both projects. Bart will be following when you return and your historic flight there. And Rick will continue to follow this project as well. So Bart and Rick, thank you so much for your insights and being with us today. I'd like to thank our listeners and also Jeremy Karaoke for producing this episode. He's our podcast producer, so don't miss the next episode by subscribing to our BCA podcast wherever you listen to them. And one last request, if you'd like to support us, please leave us a star rating or write a review. And thanks again, Rick and Bart.
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