based on aircraft performance . Many of Combs' suggestions are still used today by the FAA. He was also a consultant to NASA during the early days of the manned space program and helped create an air-training base in Arizona for CIA Covert Operations. Comb Aircraft was sold to Gates Rubber Company for $1.5 million in December 1966. Renamed Combs Gates Denver Inc., it became a subsidiary of Gates Aviation Corp. Combs decided to retire. In December 1969, stockholders elected Combs to serve as president of the board of directors of Gates Learjet, a new merger of Gates Rubber and Lear Jet Industries. In October 1970, he moved to Wichita, Kansas to oversee Gates Learjet, which manufactured corporate airplanes. His salary was around $50,000 a year, but the company was failing with a $13 million deficit. Combs said, “When I first got down there, I said to the sales manager, ‘What are our hot prospects?' He had about three. We had about 800 employees and half-built bodies of airplanes laying around. There were no sales. I was told it was because the market was bad. I said, ‘No, it’s the way we’re running things!’” Under Combs’ leadership, Gates Learjet made a remarkable financial turnaround, with some $15 million in the bank and no debt by June 1972. It became the largest manufactures of business aircraft in the world. In 1975, he relocated the business from Wichita to Tucson, Arizona. The Learjet was the first United States civil aircraft to be FAA-approved for a normal cruise at 51,000 feet. It was also the first plane to incorporate NASA's thrust-enhancing "winglet" technology. He retired in 1982 when the company had $240 million in equity. Combs was also the founder of the national chain of corporate airplane service centers, AMR Combs. Writing Neil Armstrong gave Combs a copy of the Wright brothers notebooks. Combs was amazed by what he read, and even went to Hollywood to try and put together a television show about the brothers. When that did not pan out, he decided to write a book. In 1979, Combs', Kill Devil Hill: Discovering the Secret of the Wright Brothers, was published. It received the James J. Streiberg Award from the Aviation/Space Writer’s Foundation and the National Air and Space Museum. He also wrote a trilogy of western novels, starting with Brules in 1992. Brules won a Big Horse Award from Conquistadores