Wayne J. Hilmer Sr. had purchased his first aircraft before he held a pilot’s license. He understood something the market hadn’t yet organized around: the first generation of business jets was entering service, and when their original owners were ready to move on, there was no infrastructure to facilitate that transaction. No database. No established protocols. No market.
Omni built one.
In July 1963 — the same month the first LearJet models 23 and 24 entered service — Omni Aircraft Sales opened at Hyde Field, just outside Washington D.C., and set about promoting a pre-owned market for the LearJet, Jetstar, Sabreliner, and Gulfstream. The firm developed and refined the offer, acceptance, and contract protocols that remain standard across the aircraft sales industry today — at a time when the telex machine was the state of the art in global communication. By 1966 it was a member of the National Business Aviation Association. In 1967 it moved to modern executive offices at 2401 Virginia Avenue, adjacent to the Watergate complex — the year Washingtonian Magazine named Wayne Hilmer and Omni “the free world’s leading merchants of used aircraft.” In 1971, Omni created the first comprehensive database of private jets and their owners in the world.
The transactions of those years show what that infrastructure produced:
1972 — Omni leases aircraft to Air America during the Vietnam War.
1973 — Frank Sinatra’s Gulfstream II, serial number 67, purchased in December and resold to the Government of Liberia.
1975 — After the war’s end, the CIA liquidates Air America’s surviving fleet through Omni: a Twin Otter, then the Bell 204B helicopters that evacuated Saigon — with every dollar returned to the U.S. Treasury.
1975 — In August of the same year, Elvis Presley Enterprises hires Omni to sell Presley’s Gulfstream G-I and Jet Commander.
1976 — Hugh Hefner’s “Black Bunny” Playboy DC-9, purchased in March and resold to AeroMexico.
1977 — Aircraft from Presley, Sinatra, and Saudi Prince Fahd, traded at the Paris Air Show.
Through the 1970s Omni pioneered the research call — regular, direct outreach to every owner on the registry, a practice competitors later adopted and the firm still uses today. The name came from the Omni VOR navigation aid; in Greek it means in all directions.