It seems there’s always an Arrow on the ramp as we’ll as a good selection of them on the used market. Flight schools have long sworn by them as relatively economical complex trainers, and owners report happy relationships with their combination of useful load and range. Through longevity and numbers, it may have replaced the Bonanza as the ubiquitous retractable single.
Since it’s little more than a retractable Cherokee, the Arrow is a logical step-up airplane for pilots accustomed to Piper’s fixed-gear four-seaters. Moving from one cockpit to the other, everything will be familiar, from gauge placement to systems to handling and procedures. That’s no accident, of course: Offering a full line of airplanes was the basic marketing model for all of the major manufacturers in the 1960s and 1970s. As they started out in two-seat trainers, pilots were encouraged to step up into similar four-place, fixed-gear models, then to retractables from the same blood line.