The Stillwell Aviation Story

How this all started is becoming legendary. The facts are that he was one of the outstanding Learjet salesmen anywhere and won awards for it. He attended the annual conventions staged by Gates Learjet Corporation with no feeling of an Australian bush boy. He had sold Learjets with the best of them. In a conference about sales prospects and other matters, he let it be known that he thought things could be done better, generally speaking. This was at once regarded as a challenge by the top-ranking executives, the whole situation ending with a challenge to him to put up or shut up. Within months he and his family had settled into a Tucson home with a fine swimming pool and other executive trimmings.

Few people question he will get to the top of his new firm. Look at the record. He was immensely successful selling cars in Australia before he got into aviation, a racing driver with far more brains than business tycoons think most daredevil characters have. He was, on his record, a first-class business executive by any world standard.

Stillwell went into car racing just after the war when he raced an MGTC and for a decade he was famous. He won four successive annual Gold Star championships in Australia before he retired in December 1965.

He had already become successful selling cars, which suggests he had considerable powers of survival. In 1949 he opened a service station in Kew, a Melbourne suburb not inhabited by many poor people, and soon secured a golden dealership. Early 1966 saw him distributing Fords and before. long he was chairman of one of the biggest volume Ford dealerships in this country, with offices also in Adelaide and more recently a truck facility in Sydney. In the last years, the Stillwell Group’s annual turnover has been 5000 new and 4000 used vehicles. Stillwell Ford dealerships have consistently won Ford Motor Company marketing awards as a leader in the field.

The point I am making is that Bib Stillwell (his initials are B. S. , to be formal) was never running a love affair with cars or aviation in the way that the struggling little guys have always done and still do. There was none of this one/two aircraft, let’s-not-waste-time-keeping-books-when-we-can-fly business which is one of the delights of General Aviation for the onlooker who has no investment in it. Bib Stillwell loves cars and loves aviation, but he has always been a true professional. If he did spend too much money on his private love of aviation at some stage, he could afford it like we take a better seat at the theatre at times.

The General Aviation Industry has always needed this approach – big businessmen who really know aviation and love flying but who can -make it pay.

Well, Stillwell got into flying because he had to get around this big country faster than cars and public transport could get him, at odd hours. He learned to fly to do just that, to commute between major racing events, to be free of timetables. Today he has 5000 hours in his logbooks, including more than 2000 on Learjets. He has a first-class instrument rating.

In 1962 he bought out Brooke’s Aviation at Moorabbin, the Melbourne general aviation airport, and quickly built this up with franchises for light plane marketing. He sold all types in succession, and built up the Stillwell Aviation Group, until there were offices in Kew, Moorabbin, Essendon, Perth, Sydney, Singapore, Bangkok and the USA. He built up a big flying operation in the West which attracted a lot of attention in the industry as a frontrunner – Stillwell Airlines, with a big commuter network and plenty of charter. With three Metroliners he was going as far as Alice Springs on what is now called a “regional service”.

In 1970 Stillwell became interested in the Learjet and in 1973 brought the first one into Australia. That was not a very businesslike exercise at the time, for there was not much of a market apparent for hotrod business jets in the early 1970s. He had to endure the long and frustrating and costly exercise of certification of this type, with the Department of Civil Aviation not cutting any corners at all. But he finished up with what a lot of people thought was the most beautiful and fastest biz jet out here. And he had the local distributorship, which he followed with the Swearingen distributorship in 1977, when the dam burst and the Australian industry started buying their costly toys.

In 1979 B. S. Stillwell was named the top world distributor for the Learjet – no wonder they were glad to import him into Arizona.

The secret, according to Miss Barbara Pearson, who was his secretary for many years and is now Administrative Manager of the new firm which bought out Stillwell some months ago, was his passion for Personal Attention and Care. These were the result of his car racing years, with his life depending on that approach. He took this into car sales and later into aviation sales. He never took the approach that you could flog by cheap prices only. Personal Involvement, Product Enthusiasm, Customer Service and Motivated Staff. Does that sound like a company PR pitch? It happens to be true. I have talked to many people about Bib Stillwell over the past years and they are united in their reaction to him.

Stillwell also has a passion for Quality and if you know the Learjet story you realise just why he was attracted to that aircraft family. That story began with one of the most amazing men in aviation history, William P. Lear, a genius who never went beyond primary school, never had a degree, never learned anything that he did not teach himself. He was born in Mark Twain’s hometown in 1902 and ran away from home at 15 to join the Navy, which regarded him as a radio expert from his long hours of reading in the public library. He was always fascinated by aeroplanes but first made a mint when he designed and went into production with the first workable car radio – largely because he was not educated enough to believe what the university experts said, that radio tuning coils had to be big.

Having learned to fly, Lear developed light radio sets for light aircraft, direction finders, navigation aids, and the lightest of all automatic pilots. He did not understand equations and he could not use a slide rule. He did all the calculations in his head by instinct. He was too ignorant to know better. In other words, a natural genius with immense practical experience.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Lear was a household word in aviation, but most people have forgotten him now, which is a pity. He was one of the great pioneers. It was William Lear who designed the first successful autopilot for jet aircraft just after the war, a fantastic achievement.

Anyway, running a big business had little interest as such and he sold out when he got the idea that he could design and develop a small business jet with all the qualities of a jet airliner except size. They said it would take 10 years and hundreds of millions of dollars. He did it in two years for $10 million, partly because he first went to Switzerland to get away from high US costs. The Swiss had a home-made fighter, the P16, which was tough and handy, the sort of basis he had in mind for the bizjet. So was formed the Swiss American Aviation Corporation, the aircraft being first known as the SAAC 23, the design done under cheap Swiss conditions and with the smaller teams prevalent in Europe. He later moved back to the USA to get an introduction because the Europeans did not have that sort of know-how and certainly not the market he needed. So Lear Jet Corporation was founded in Wichita, the home of Cessna, Beech and Piper, in 1962. They eat and drink aviation in that city, which also houses a big Boeing plant.

Lear even designed the building for his 75 employees, built it in five months, and eight months later had the first aircraft rolled out. That was the Learjet (one word), which the FAA certificated in 10 months, a very fast piece of official work that testified to the Lear design.

Keep in mind that this was the first jet aircraft designed for the business market, rather than an adapted military design, which Lockheed’s JetStar and North America’s Sabreliner were. They went after Government orders, while Bill Lear went to business. He delivered his first in October 1964. There then followed a whole batch of world speed and other records, which helped to sell 80 in the first 18 months.

Why didn’t Bill Lear make a success of it, financially speaking? For one thing he diversified – he had a passion for stereo and that took a lot of time getting into production and selling, etc – without having the capital depth for it. He also had a lousy marketing set-up, using the old dealer system the industry had seen for years in general aviation. The business market just couldn’t be handled that way.

Lear was soon selling them but losing money. In 1967 Charles C. Gates, who ran The Gates Rubber Company founded by his father, was told by Harry Combs, a veteran flier whose fixed base operation Gates had bought out, that the Lear operation could be revived with $10 million and a proper sales approach. Gates obeyed. Lear stayed as Chairman only two years, when Gates stepped into it. In 1970 there were 250 Learjets flying but the firm still lost a packet. New versions appeared, the 24 and 25, and broke more records . . . New York/Los Angeles return in 11 hours 23 minutes elapsed time non-stop each way. Late in 1971 the firm was in real trouble, to the tune of $13 million and no money to pay wages.

The answer was Combs, born in 1913 and so well-heeled he had settled down to golf in Florida. Combs was a very great figure – still is. He even knew how to design aeroplanes, having done one himself, and he was practical. He set up a group of company-owned sales offices and brought the marketing offices from Denver (for goodness sake, why had Denver been the sales HQ when the plant was in Wichita?) and by a shares deal with Gates Rubber wiped out the deficit. He did a deal with Flight Safety International to )rain pilots for customers and set about remaking the aircraft itself. There was an $8. 6 million profit in his first year. The distributor/dealer idea paid off. The 35 and 36 models with longer range were quickly developed to widen the market. In the late 1970s the firm had money coming out of its collective ears, so to speak.

Gates Learjet Corporation then had an aeroplane family which has the lowest operating costs of any bizjet and the lowest fixed costs, with a very good resale value. And it could say its Learjet had one of the strongest airframes ever built – the wing can’t fail even if a spar is severed.

One feels has Hary Combs and Bib Stillwell fought to get along. It is not impossible to believe that Mr Combs sees the younger Australian as his logical successor, and brought him over.

When that event occurred late last year, the Stillwell Empire was a pretty impressive organisation. Stillwell Aviation employed 100. It was caring for 143 turbine-powered aeroplanes. It had opened a Brisbane facility, it had moved into a hangar at Essendon, it had sold 14 Learjets and Swearingens in 1979, and Gates Learjet Corporation recognised it as the Best International Distributor and the Best Service Centre anywhere.

Wards, the freight carrier firm, had made world history by adapting the Learjet for all-cargo operation – developments which would have been quite inconceivable only a few years ago. The Corporation in Wichita co-operated in the adaptation as a fascinating enterprise. Three Learjets are now operated in the Wards operation and return the highest utilisation in the world.

Nineteen seventy-nine was really a fine year. Australian customers were signed up for three Model 55s, for delivery in 1981. The firm became self-sufficient in avionics, so that all avionics units in Learjets and Swearingen prop-jets can be repaired in-house. The company is now the Collins distributor and repair facility here. The $500,000 complex at Eagle Farm, with its own hangar and workshop supports Bush Pilots Airways Metros and corporate aircraft in the area.

And in 1979 the firm delivered five Learjets, all 35As, worth $13 million, and four Metros and a Merlin, worth $11 million. Add to that the spares and the business done representing Garrett AiResearch, the US firm which makes the engines. They are now going on for 200 Garrett AiResearch engines in the firm’s territory here and in SE Asia, with more than $1 million committed in spares and tooling. Modification work is handled at Essendon.

All of which makes up a pretty fat business with a marvellous future, you will rightly say. The problem was, early 1980, could Bib Stillwell remain at its head all the way from Tucson, was there a conflict of interest, was his future entirely in the USA from 1980 on?

The real key man in the Stillwell Aviation story, however, was 37-year-old David Crompton, a smiling, likeable executive-style man based in Sydney who had come to Stillwell Aviation only three years before. He had been 10 years with Hawker de Havilland in Sydney, where he was running the Distributor Group. This was really the General Aviation side of HdeH, which is now more or less Hawker Pacific Pty Ltd.

When he came to Stillwell Aviation that firm was turning over some $5 million a year. He built it up in three years to some $25 million with a 1980 figure of $30 million very certain indeed. There can be little question he was the dynamo who turned Stillwell Aviation into the sales success it is. Future development of the Learjet/Swearingen/Garrett distributorships in the 1980s centred on him.

Soon after Bib Stillwell went to Tucson David Crompton visited him there and sitting by the fine pool at the Stillwell home the idea came from both of them that Stillwell could not continue his interest in his Australian/SE Asian aircraft sales organisation. The obvious solution was for the successful executive Crompton to take it over. As they talked this out, they restricted it to the big aircraft sales interests and not the big Western Australian venture or the business down at Moorabbin.

In the event, the Perth-based operation has been taken over by other interests and Bib Stillwell’s son, Michael, has started running Civil Flying Services at Moorabbin as a family-owned interest.

Mr Crompton told me it was quite an experience to raise the money needed for this takeover. He needed $4 million in equity capital plus $8 million borrowing – $2 million as working capital plus the price of $3 million for the fixed assets and $2. 2 million for all trading stock.

The new firm is Stillwell Aviation (A’asia) Pty Ltd, the former company being B. S. Stillwell Aviation (A’asia) Pty Ltd. That latter firm still exists, for various reasons, but everything connected with the Learjet, Swearingen and Garrett AiResearch distributorships, including the distributorships themselves for the whole Pacific west of Samoa through to Thailand, has been sold to the new company. Mr Crompton is the managing director of that new firm.

The fascinating aspect of the new firm is that David Crompton got East-West Airlines Ltd and BPA (Bush Pilots Airways) of Cairns to take up big holdings in the company, as well as Narich Pty Ltd, a property dealer in Sydney, and Aviation Developments Pty Ltd, also of Sydney. Other money came from Associates representing Mr Stillwell, and 17 employees, who are represented on the board by David Crompton. (Some of those employees have put themselves in hock to take up their share interest, which says something for our friend Crompton. )

The well-known Mr John Riley of East-West is a director, which certainly brings experience and know-how to the organisation.

The money interest on the board and in the firm is the Commercial Bank of Australia, with its subsidiary General Credits, which will help to “streamline” loans and credits and generally ease the financing of aircraft deals. That is vital, for as anybody in the industry will tell you, only an idiot pays cash for aircraft.

The new firm, David Crompton told me, has deposits on 20 Metros and Merlins for delivery in 1980/82 and for six Longhorn Learjets up to 1984. There is a shortage of these aircraft in the world today and the firm has signed up all the aircraft it can get from the two manufacturers.

As of April 1, 1980, there were 16 Learjets in this country and nine Metros plus two Merlins. Four of the Metros were with BPA and a fifth came in October. I understand the airline will buy another two before long, to make seven. Civil Flying Services has two, Bizjets one, of Kendell Airlines one, with another soon to order, and there is one in the hangar to be sold.

It is certain that East-West and its subsidiary Northern, the new Northern Territory state airline replacing Connair, will have a sizeable fleet of Metros soon. Northern had one coming into service at the end of April and a second coming up, with certainly another couple in the next couple of years. East-West will have at least a couple coming into service shortly and must absorb a larger number.

The Merlin has not been so successful, as it is a business prop-jet but it certainly has a future. The capital cost differential between the stylish and fast prop jet and the whiz-kid jet is enough to make the average firm think very hard. The new company thinks in terms of good Merlin sales. And they can see the Metro coming into its own in that area also.

One of the troubles about selling pure jets, however, is the coy attitude taken by Big Business – they don’t want their shareholders to know. (I can remember the antics BHP PR men adopted years ago when the first Grumman Gulfstream arrived at Essendon: the public and the shareholders must not know. )

But the story is that the famous Western Australian mining magnate Lang Hancock bought a 25 in 1974 to start the sales account, with Swan Breweries of Perth second. Swan later traded in the 25 for a 35, which is becoming par for the course. (All manufacturers and salesmen love this, for it is a testimonial. ) Arnold Glass, the millionaire racing magnate who sold out Capital Motors for $13 million has one. Barclay Brothers, the Queensland builders, also replaced their 25 with a 35A and operate it for charter now. (They got more for their 25 than they had paid for it. ) Narich has a 35, to prove that shareholders have liked it.

To me, the surprising operator of a 35 is Katies, the dress firm, which has a beautifully presented aircraft.

Stillwell’s have three operating, one on all-cargo work for Wards, who have two themselves, one for radar work with the Navy, and a third being used for mapping for Government departments. Jet Charter, of course, have two operating for TNT all-cargo, making five Learjets flying all-cargo operations in Australia today.

What the firm now wants to do is to sell the Learjet to the RAAF as an all-purpose aircraft. Stillwell argues that it costs about $1000 a day to operate, can fly up to 51,000 feet and get across Australia much of the time. It can be used for reconnaissance, VIP work, hack transport work, off-shore patrols, target towing, radar testing and identification, and the lot. Last year’s tour of Australia by the colourful Learjet Special Mission Aircraft was aimed at the offshore surveillance/patrol market. It was armed with sonobuoys, flares, vast ECM (electronic counter-measures) equipment, reconnaissance cameras, sideways-looking radar and so on, even a high-intensity searchlight.

It also wants to sell the big new Series 50, that $4 million aeroplane that can really do the non-stop trans-continental flight regardless of wind and weather under all conditions. The firm has three of these sold with non-fundable deposits and a fourth also lined up for delivery in a couple of years, making four to which the firm is committed financially. Of course, no names are being put on those sold aircraft, more is the pity.

Another ambition is to really get going with sales in South-East Asia. It has men in Singapore, Bangkok and other SE Asian cities and has sold Merlins to the Thai Air Force, which Stillwell’s service. But what David Crompton would like is to get right into that military market, for there is obviously a re-armament period being entered there following the recent international troubles.

What he would really love to get hold of is the right to sell some sort of attack aircraft in SE Asia, not too expensive. There is, he thinks, a big future for that bracket of aircraft in the area.

Among other futures: the Swearingen organisation expects to have approval from the FAA in mid-1980 for Metro weights to rise to 13,100lb TOW and 12,9001b landing weight, which will not harm sales. (The Merlin secured a 10001b increase in maximum landing weight last September. )

The future does not look bad for the new Stillwell firm!