Lear project’s end a blow to Ulster

Press, 29 May 1985, Page 28

Lear project’s end a blow to Ulster

NZPA-Reuter Belfast The collapse of an American project to make a revolutionary fuel-efficient plane in Northern Ireland has dealt a heavy blow to one of Europe’s worst unemployment blackspots. The announcement of the Lear Fan’s demise was being seen as a new industrial setback in the province for the British Government, which put £57 million ($NZ161.3 million) of taxpayers’ money into the venture. In 1982, an American entrepreneur, Mr John de Lorean’s, “dream car” project in Belfast ended in a debacle after swallowing SUSI3OM (SNZ2BB.6M) of State funds. The latest news was a bitter disappointment to Moya Lear, widow of the American inventor, Bill Lear, who designed the plane and is said to have urged her on his deathbed to finish the project. Lear pioneered the executive jet, the car radio and the eight-track tape cartridge. The Lear Fan, the first

plane to be built entirely from extra-light carbon fibre, was claimed to fly almost as fast as a jet on a third of the fuel.

If successful, the project would have provided up to 3000 jobs, a bonanza in Northern Ireland, a province of 1.5 million people where 22 per cent are out of work. In some parts of Belfast the rate is more than 50 per cent. To be successful the eight-seat plane needed an airworthiness certificate from the United States Federal Aeronautics Administration, without which it had no chance of tapping a growing and potentially lucrative world market for executive aircraft.

Problems developed from the start. The maiden flight had to be put back three months because of faulty brakes, then a succession of snags developed with the wings, fuselage, door seals and gearbox. Certification, originally promised for October, 1982, was put back several times. With money running out, two rescue schemes had to

be mounted, one involving funds from the United States and the second from a European and Saudi Arabian consortium which put in about SUS6OM (SNZI33.2M).

In an effort to conserve the remaining cash until certification, most of Lear’s 500 employees in Northern Ireland were laid off last year with a promise they would be rehired when the plane was passed by the authorities. But the F.A.A. was reported to be concerned about the plane’s propulsion system, a single rearmounted “pusher” propeller driven by twin turbines through a single gearbox and transmission shaft.

After recurring gearbox problems prompted the F.A.A. to refuse certification during the latest series of tests, the company has decided to cease trading. Its decision has been confirmed by the British Government. The Government had made it clear after the last financial rescue that there would be no further State funding for the project.