Airtest — Piper Archer

Piper Archer III

I used to think PA-28s were boring, tinny aeroplanes, ill equipped, noisy, with poor ailerons, meagre visibility and lacklustre performance.

I felt my two hundred odd hours of learning to fly in Cherokees entitled me to refer to them as “Nasty, outdated, flying tin-cans”. I did not want anything to do with them. But Piper’s new Archer III has proved my closed mind quite wrong. The Cherokee has changed! The PA-28 family has grown up, and in doing so it has matured. Today’s Archer III bears so little resemblance to its early predecessors that I might hardly have recognised it. With a superior finish, truly comprehensive standard equipment, good performance and better handling, almost all aspects of the design have improved by an order of magnitude.

G-PIPA is the first Archer III to cross the Atlantic. Except for its air conditioner, GPS and leather seats, this excellently equipped aeroplane is totally standard, just as it comes from the factory. No longer just a basic trainer/tourer, the latest Archer is aimed squarely at the private owner wanting a comfortable, quiet, smooth, reasonably fast but easily mastered four seat, go places aeroplane. And it has a surprisingly good disposable load and field performance, even off grass.

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