PIPER'S COMANCHE 180 - IT TICKS ALL THE BOXES

The Comanche is a fabulous plane - that was frankly just too good to be a Piper.

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THE COMANCHE WAS DESIGNED by Howard “Pug” Piper, the son of company founder Bill Piper. It featured advanced design features such as a tapered laminar flow wing and an all-moving stabilator in place of the more common fixed horizontal stabiliser and elevator.

The Comanche’s innovative, but labour-intensive design features, made it expensive to build. Then, when Hurricane Agnes flooded Piper’s Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, production facility in 1972— it was all the excuse Piper needed to end Comanche production and replace it with the cheaper and easier-to-build PA-28 Cherokees.

The Comanche was Piper’s first modern aircraft. In 1957, just the year before the introduction of the Comanche, Piper’s top-of-the-line single-engine model was the fixed-gear, boxy-looking, rag and tube, PA-22 Tri-Pacer.

It is noteworthy that, after decades of churning out high-wing planes, Piper chose a low-wing for its first all-metal plane. One explanation is that Al Mooney, the founder of Mooney Aircraft, was flying an early M-20 prototype and landed at Lock Haven because of bad weather. Pug Piper found room in a Piper hangar for the low-wing plane and promised to keep it safe while Mooney continued his trip. It’s said that Piper engineers went over the Mooney with a fine-toothed comb – and that’s why the Comanche as the first all-metal Piper, looks a lot like a Mooney, but without the Mooney’s iconic ‘backwards’ empennage.

Underappreciated