 But Lear Siegler, which went private in 1987, is an influential part of the manufacturing industry in the United States.Unlike Lear, LSI does not produce executive jets that bear the “Lear” name.During the late 1950s, and throughout the 1960s and 1970s, America (and Southern California in particular) was experiencing an unprecedented boom in aviation technology and aerospace research and development, based on a "space race" inaugurated by the launch of Sputnik, a simple but startling first in a long history of scientific and technological competition between the United States and the Soviet Union.