Our review of the 100 most recent accidents involving the Beech Musketeer series uncovered very few of the classic poor judgment events such as buzzing (1) and VFR into IMC (4) that we normally see during such accident surveys. Thats the good news.
For the May 2015 issue of Aviation Consumer, our Used Aircraft Guide will be on the Cessna 195, the classic radial-powered single. We want to know what its like to own these planes, how much they cost to operate, maintain and insure and what theyre like to fly. If youd like your airplane to appear in the magazine, send us any photographs (full-size, high-resolution) youd like to share to the email below. We welcome information on mods, support organizations or any other comments. Please send correspondence on the Cessna 195 by March 1, 2015, to:
Beechcraft was never all-in in the training market. Its niche was carved out from day one with the Bonanza, a high-performance traveling machine that the company knew would attract buyers who learned to fly in something made by Cessna or Piper.Thats why when some pilots walk the ramp, they clap eyes on a Musketeer or a Sundowner and cant quite place what it really is. There just arent that many of them out there and they are far outnumbered by Skyhawks and Cherokees. But to Beechs credit, what it did, it did right, at least in terms of comfort and handling, if not performance.
First hitting the market in 1958, the Piper PA-24 Comanche was a radical departure for Piper. Until then, the company had built mostly rag-and-tube taildraggers. Instead, the Comanche was a thoroughly modern design focused on speed and good looks, and targeting the high-performance piston-single market being tapped by the Beech Bonanza and Cessna 210, among others.Pipers sleek, roomy all-metal design featured an oval-section fuselage, tapered laminar-flow wing and sharp-edged styling. The looks still turn heads today. A South African company is even building an all-composite lookalike for the kit-built crowd, the Ravin. More important for the discriminating used aircraft buyer, the Comanche lends itself to upgrading, and owners who bring the airplane up to the state-of-the-art tend to hang onto them forever. There’s no shortage of mods that step the aircraft up in speed and looks.
Our review of the 100 most recent Piper Comanche accidents uncovered something we expected in an aging fleet-a substantial number of accidents due to failure to perform needed maintenance or maintenance that was poorly performed. It showed up in engine failures, 12 gear collapses and an inflight breakup where a badly repaired stabilator came apart.
In our review of the 100 most recent Cessna 310 NTSB accident reports, landing gear problems led the list. There were 25 reported gear-related events, 20 of which were collapses. There were probably more because gear-up landings arent always reported-they almost never cause enough damage to meet the NTSB definition of a reportable accident.
For the March 2015 issue of Aviation Consumer, our Used Aircraft Guide will be on the Cessna P210, the pressurized six-seat piston single. We want to know what its like to own these planes, how much they cost to operate, maintain and insure and what theyre like to fly. If youd like your airplane to appear in the magazine, send us any photographs (full-size, high-resolution) youd like to share to the email below. We welcome information on mods, support organizations or any other comments. Please send correspondence on the Cessna P210 by January 1, 2015, to:
If Piper put general aviation on the map with the J-3 Cub, Beechcraft made it possible to actually go places on that map, thanks to the incomparable Bonanza. With antecedents dating to 1947, the venerable V-tail remained in continuous production until 1982, something no other model can claim.
In an era when the state-of-the-art aircraft have to be baked in an oven after being laid up in plastic sheets squished together in vacuum bags, it’s hard to imagine that a wood and fabric wonder like the Bellanca Viking still exists. But it does. And although there aren’t great squadrons of them around, the […]
Pilots looking for a used aircraft usually have a mission in mind: Carry a specific payload over a certain distance in a minimum amount of time. And if you need to get to and from remote locations while mixing it up at nearby Big City International, you might have overlooked the helicopter.
It may not be the fastest airplane to sport a big Lycoming, but on pure style points, it has no equal.
When Fred Weick and John Thorp set out to design a less expensive alternative to Piper’s Comanche, it’s unlikely they thought the resulting PA-28 series would become so popular, so durable or so varied. Since introducing the Cherokee 150 and Cherokee 160 (PA-28-150 and PA-28-160, respectively) in 1961, Piper has stretched, T-tailed, turbocharged and reproduced that basic airframe tens of thousands of times.
