January 2005
The Piper name is perhaps the most famous in all of aviation, but the fact that William T. Piper was even in the airplane business was a fluke. When the Taylor Brothers Aircraft Co. was raising local money to relocate their operation to Bradford, Penn., Piper’s partner in an oil company committed $400 of Piper’s money while he was out of town. Piper was named to the board of directors, and appointed treasurer.
Less than a year later the Taylors were bankrupt, and Piper bought their assets for a bid of $761. A savvy businessman, he put designers to work improving the Taylor product, and the E-2 emerged. The Taylor J-2 Cub followed in 1935.
Two years later a fire destroyed the Bradford factory and the company moved to Lock Haven, where the name was changed to Piper Aircraft Corp. and their first product was the J-3 Cub, priced at $1,270.
Piper goes to war
As the threat of war hung over Europe, President Roosevelt inaugurated a flight training program for college students that utilized the new Cub to turn out thousands of pilots. It was a stroke of political genius. It not only kept Piper and others in business supplying aircraft, but also created a ready source of pilots should the U.S. become involved in the European war.
Piper aircraft now represented fully one-third of all the civil aircraft in the country, but its big opportunity came during the 1941 Army games, when Cub pilots directed armored columns and artillery fire from the air. From this exercise came the creation of a corps of airborne fire controllers and observers. The Army quickly ordered 1,500 Cubs with the designation L-4, nicknamed “Grasshoppers,” and its missions expanded. By the end of the war in 1945, 5,673 L-4s had served with distinction in every major theater around the world.
An uneasy peacetime
Returning to civilian production, the company produced more than 6,400 aircraft in 1946, but over the next two years the market dried up, and Piper was dangerously close to bankruptcy. The company’s major creditor sent a hatchet man named T. Craig Shriver to Lock Haven to shore up the leaking assets.
Bill Piper was forced to let him temporarily take over management of his company. Shriver fired most everyone and set Walter Jamouneau to work on designing a really cheap airplane that would sell quickly and restore dollars to the company coffers.
Six weeks after the order came down, the PA-15 Vagabond flew. Priced at $1,995, it was the least expensive airplane in the world, and over the course of two years nearly 600 were sold and Mr. Piper got his company back.
In December of 1948, Piper found an opportunity to buy existing engineering and manufacturing expertise when he struck a deal to purchase the assets of the Stinson Division of Consolidated Vultee. The inventory included about a hundred Stinson 108-3 Voyagers and Station Wagons. Piper records show sales of 325 Stinsons, suggesting they built about 125 aircraft at the Wayne, MI Stinson plant from components acquired with the purchase.
The Twin Stinson
Taking on Stinson ultimately proved to be an unprofitable decision, but Bill Piper was able to salvage one positive program from the acquisition—the Twin Stinson. Part of the assets included a proposal and plans for a twin-engine model that would provide the company a low-cost entrée into the “executive” twin market, hopefully distancing them away from their “Cub” image.
The Twin Stinson was to be a low-wing four-seater powered by 125 hp O-290s, had fixed gear, twin vertical fins and fabric-covered fuselage and outer wing panels. A prototype PA-23 was built and flown during the summer of 1952, but lots of changes had to be made. The powerplants were upgraded to 150 hp O-320s, the gear was retracted, most of the fabric covering was replaced with aluminum and the twin tails were replaced with a rounded Piper unit.
The PA-23, now named Apache, premiered early in 1954 at $32,500, and 73-year-old William T. Piper celebrated by getting his multi-engine rating. The Apache would become the cornerstone of the company’s postwar growth.
Other models continued to sell during the same time period, and the PA-12 Cub Cruiser and PA-14 Family Cruiser were proving that customers were interested in aircraft that carried more than two people. The four-place PA-20 Pacer and PA-22 Tri-Pacer became market mainstays.
The loss leader
One problem that faced the company, however, was that its in-house designs were not exactly leading-edge. For the sake of manufacturing economy, most new designs were built using parts that were common with the old designs—standard procedure among most manufacturers. The rest of the industry was upgrading to all-metal while Piper was still using inexpensive but time-consuming fabric. And with each passing year, its market share was dwindling very slightly.
Piper Aircraft needed to come up with a model that would push them back into the forefront of a market that was demanding more technology and innovation. To Bill Piper, those ideas had an expensive sound. Besides, their small engineering group didn’t have either the personnel or the time to sandwich new airplane design into their work day. So, Mr. Piper went shopping for a new airplane.
In 1954 he flew to Wichita where Al Mooney was putting the final touches on his M-20 design. No one is quite sure what the offer was, but Al turned it down and decided to build his airplane in Texas.
Next, he visited John Thorpe, whose Sky Scooter had generated some interest. No deal. He tried to buy Fred Weick’s Ercoupe, but again failed. It’s not clear what happened after Bill returned to Lock Haven, but early in 1955 the rumors began to leak out of the plant that a sleek new single was being built.
Where it came from is anyone’s guess. It was very un-Piper-like: sleek, modern, all-metal, and it had sophisticated, complex structures. Even today, veteran Piper employees are at a loss to explain where the design originated, but everyone is certain that it wasn’t in Lock Haven.
It was the Comanche, and it took General Aviation by storm. It was a direct competitor to the Beech Bonanza—for $6,400 less.
It also cost twice as much as a Tri-Pacer, and that had to be troublesome to Bill Piper, who had always believed in high value at the lowest possible price. In the case of the Comanche, Piper made a monumental error.
Manufacturing cost accountants had difficulty estimating labor and materials on an airframe that was unfamiliar and more complicated to manufacture than any past Piper. However, a selling price was needed before the airplane could be sold, so the numbers people took an educated guess and set the Comanche 180 price at $14,500 and the 250 at $17,900.
Piper customers loved it, and they should have. The company was losing about 5 percent on every airplane.
The Pawnees
In 1949, Texas A&M University proposed a design project dubbed the AG-1 to build a specialized, all-metal agricultural application airplane that would take advantage of postwar advances in aerodynamics, construction and materials while providing good payload and performance.
The University got support from Piper, Beech and Cessna for the project, which was led by veteran designer Fred Weick. Bill Piper’s son, “Pug,” was interested in producing the airplane, but as usual the company didn’t have the resources to invest, so in 1953, they sponsored another A&M design project calling for a smaller aircraft that could use welded steel tube and fabric construction and as many PA-18 and PA-22 components as possible. The design was called the Texas AG-3, and as soon as satisfactory flight testing was completed in 1956, Piper hired Weick on contract and put him in charge of building what would be called the PA-25 Pawnee.
Strut-braced Cub wings were attached to a downward-sloping forward fuselage; the pilot sat high behind the hopper, and the aft fuselage was fabric-covered. It had a PA-22 vertical and horizontal tail and the main gear was the same solid strut unit as found on all other Pipers. Pre-production aircraft were built at a new company facility in Vero Beach, and production started in May 1959 at Lock Haven.
Enter the Cherokee
About the time Pawnee flight testing began, Mr. Piper had concluded that if his company was going to prosper, it had better get back to concentrating on the low-cost market that had made it successful—and profitable. In January, work started on the preliminary design for a low-cost single, and not coincidentally, three months later Fred Weick was hired to head the project, and he brought John Thorpe along.
Overall, the new design was far less complex than the PA-24. Weick specified a basic, easy to build constant-chord wing and the “flying tail” stabilator that had premiered on the Comanche. The airplane would be built at the company’s new plant in Vero Beach, Fla., and it had half the number of parts as the Comanche—and 25 percent less than even the simple Tri-Pacer.
The first experimental PA-28 Cherokee with 150 hp O-320-A2A engine flew on Jan. 10, 1960 in Florida. The engineering prototype was fitted with a 160 hp O-320 and it gained FAA certification on Halloween 1960, with deliveries beginning early in 1961 with an under-$10,000 price tag.
An enthusiastic public bought 670 units the first year. When Piper began to promote pilot training with its $5 flight coupons in 1963-64, it backed the program with the $9,000 two-seat, 140 hp Cherokee 140. Two years later the Cherokee returned to 150 hp and improved both its performance and its sales record.
Despite his usual zealous effort to hold prices, Mr. Piper finally learned what other companies already knew—that, given a choice, not that many customers opt for lower-power airplanes. He had yet to discover that few were interested in bare-bones models, either.
The Vero Beach Pipers
Piper had opened its Vero Beach, FL facility in 1957 to build the new Cherokee and assemble Navajos, but the Cubs and Comanches still originated in Lock Haven.
In 1968, William Piper retired from the company he had bought into 37 years earlier. He relinquished the presidency to his son, Bill, and retained the title of chairman.
In 1972 a devastating flood in Pennsylvania destroyed much of the machinery and most of the airplane inventory.
It would have cost millions to replace the tooling for the Comanche on which he claimed he never made a decent profit—so Piper took the opportunity to discontinue the line and close the Lock Haven facility. The Arrow, which had been introduced in the mid-1960s, was selling well, and its profit margin was much better than the Comanche.
As the decade of the 1970s opened, Piper was the target of an unfriendly takeover by boat builder Chris Craft. In one of his last corporate acts before he passed away in 1970 at age 89, William Piper negotiated a friendly merger with Bangor Punta, a diversified holding company.
He had persevered and kept the company intact through a number of crises throughout the nearly forty years he had run the company. Unfortunately, shrinking markets and rising costs kept it from fully recovering from a series of takeovers, and production was suspended more than once.
Today, after several resurrections, the latest iteration of the company is alive and well and building airplanes in Florida. Of course, if the parsimonious Mr. Piper were alive to see what his airplanes are selling for today, he would most certainly be busy trying to figure out a way to do it for less.
William T. Piper was enshrined in the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1980.
Daryl Murphy, in addition to serving as a contributing editor for Piper Flyer, writes for Aviation International News and General Aviation News. He has been a pilot since the days when you could buy a new Cherokee 150 for about $11,000.
