Piper Archer III

There was a PA28 Piper Archer III parked up at Wellington today. From the outside it looks similar to a Piper Arrow [PA28-201R -ZK-EIF is the Wellington Aero Club's Arrow as a comparison]. There are however a few good things about this Archer III.

Firstly, inside are a couple of Garmin 1000 screens, with pretty much just some standby instruments. This makes for a pretty neat cockpit!

Secondly, it's new. It's good to see both Cessna and Piper continuing to build GA single engined aircraft after the well publicised hiatus some years back. It's even better that there is some competition in this space [including competition from a range of other manufacturers, such as Cirrus and Alpha].

The one thing I don't like about it is that for some reason Piper have chosen to reduce the size of all of the windows. I'm not sure how obvious this is from the photos, but have a look at them "for real" and you'll see that the Archer III has considerably smaller windows all round.

Does Piper really think that we're all flying their aircraft IFR, or that we don't want to watch the scenery go by? I don't know. Just a shame, as it starts to take the gloss off what has historically been a very capable, and fun, cross country machine.

Anyway, enjoy the photos. First is ZK-LJC from Canterbury Aero Club, and the second ZK-EIF from Wellington Aero Club as a comparison.

[Many thanks to John Macilree who advised a couple of errors in my original text to this post. Somehow I wrote down ZK-EIF as ZK-FHQ, a similar but not quite the same, aircraft]