In this study, an air heated solar collector (AHSC) dryer was designed to determine the drying characteristics of the pear. Flat pear slices of 10 mm thickness were used in the experiments. The pears were dried both in the AHSC dryer and under the sun. Panel glass temperature, panel floor temperature, panel inlet temperature, panel outlet temperature, drying cabinet inlet temperature, drying cabinet outlet temperature, drying cabinet temperature, drying cabinet moisture, solar radiation, pear internal temperature, air velocity and mass loss of pear were measured at 30 min intervals. Experiments were carried out during the periods of June 2017 in Elazig, Turkey. The experiments started at 8:00 a.m. and continued till 18:00. The experiments were continued until the weight changes in the pear slices stopped. Wet basis moisture content (MCw), dry basis moisture content (MCd), adjustable moisture ratio (MR), drying rate (DR), and convective heat transfer coefficient (h_c) were calculated with both in the AHSC dryer and the open sun drying experiment data. It was found that the values of h_c in both drying systems with a range 12.4 and 20.8 W/m² °C. Three different kernel models were used in the support vector machine (SVM) regression to construct the predictive model of the calculated h_c values for both systems. The mean absolute error (MAE), root mean squared error (RMSE), relative absolute error (RAE) and root relative absolute error (RRAE) analysis were performed to indicate the predictive model’s accuracy. As a result, the rate of drying of the pear was examined for both systems and it was observed that the pear had dried earlier in the AHSC drying system. A predictive model was obtained using the SVM regression for the calculated h_c values for the pear in the AHSC drying system. The normalized polynomial kernel was determined as the best kernel model in SVM for estimating the h_c values.