In April 1978, Omni moved to 11300 Rockville Pike and became The Omni International Jet Trading Floor — a name chosen deliberately, modeled on the structure and discipline of a financial exchange, to match the explosive growth in transaction volume the firm was handling. The next month, Forbes Magazine featured Wayne Hilmer and Omni as the leading name in pre-owned aircraft sales.
The record kept building. In 1978, Omni’s subsidiary International Airmotive purchased and resold the Lisa Marie — Elvis Presley’s Convair 880, his most famous and most extensively customized aircraft. In 1979, a Boeing 707 leased through Omni carried Ross Perot’s team in the rescue of two EDS employees held in a Tehran prison during the Iranian Revolution — a mission conceived, funded, and executed by Perot when government channels had failed, and chronicled by Ken Follett in his 1983 bestseller On Wings of Eagles.
By 1980, close to twenty percent of the entire pre-owned aircraft inventory available in the United States was listed exclusively with Omni. In 1983, the firm became the first in the industry to put its owner-and-operator database on an IBM mainframe — a market intelligence capability no competitor could match.
In 1985, Omni built a 20,000-square-foot facility at Easton Airport on Maryland’s Eastern Shore — Easton Jet Center — for the storage and management of owned and consigned aircraft. It remains operational today.
In 1988, Wayne J. Hilmer Jr. assumed the presidency. He had been on delivery flights at age ten. He held his pilot’s license before his driver’s license.