Piper Aircraft history

By 1938 three events changed the company's fortunes: The partnership had been dissolved and Mr.

In 1941, the year the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and brought the United States into the war, Piper sales totaled 2,881 aircraft.

By the time the Navy assumed this responsibility in 1943, the small airplanes of the CAP had flown more than 86,000 missions, from the Canadian border to Tampico, Mexico.

The likeness of a friendly bear clad in blue jeans and a ranger hat has symbolized American wildfire prevention since the Advertising Council created him in 1944.

In 1946, the company opened a new factory in Ponca City, Oklahoma, and transferred production of the Cub from Lock Haven.

The light plane industry with Piper in the vanguard position enjoyed strong growth up until the spring of 1947.

In 1948, when the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish purchased an airplane for $3,000, Raymond Bell became the state’s first “flying game warden.”

The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 helped to stimulate production at Piper, which again won large orders for military versions of the Cub.

His story was told by William “Hopalong Cassidy” Boyd in a short film, “Little Smokey.” There was even a song, “Smokey the Bear,” written in 1952—which thereafter added confusion about Smokey’s name, as “the” was added to “Smokey Bear” to make it sound better when sung.

First Apache Built in 1954

She and her pilot husband, Owen, live on a residential airport near Webster, Minnesota and fly a 1955 Piper Pacer.

The company built a research manufacturing facility at a naval airbase in Vero Beach, Florida, in 1957.

Vero Beach was initially used as a center for design work under Fred Weick, with the first aircraft developed there being Piper's first agricultural aircraft, the PA-25 Pawnee, announced in 1958 and entering production the following year at Lock Haven.

In 1960, the line of Piper aircraft consisted of an agricultural- and two-passenger variants of the Super Cub, the Caribbean, Colt and Tri-Pacer, two versions of the PA-24 Comanche, the Pawnee, the Apache and its new larger derivative the Aztec.

The PA-28 Cherokee, which went into production at the company's expanded Vero Beach manufacturing facilities in January 1961, was to be one of the company's most successful designs.

In 1963, Piper supported Betty Miller's successful attempt to be the first female pilot to fly solo across the Pacific Ocean, during which she delivered a twin-engine Piper aircraft from Oakland, California, USA to Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

In September 1964, Piper flew the prototype of its new PA-31 Navajo cabin-class twin for the first time, after two-and-a-half years of development.

The PA-32 Cherokee Six, introduced in 1965, was the earliest derivative and featured a stretched cabin with room for six people and an additional door in the rear.

Another twin-engine plane, the PA-31 Navajo, was introduced in 1967 specifically as a business aircraft.

Another tribe, the Pocono, became a quick casualty when a hostile takeover of the Piper Co. began in January 1969.

By 1970, the company had produced 80,000 planes (24,000 of them Piper Cubs); one in every four general aviation planes was a Piper.

A Congressional resolution of 1974 stipulated that Smokey’s remains be returned to New Mexico for burial at the Smokey Bear Historical Park in Capitan, New Mexico.

The living Smokey Bear officially retired on May 2, 1975 and remained at the National Zoological Park until he died on Nov.

By 1976, the company produced its 100,000th airplane.

Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay politicians to win public office in the United States, a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977.

The PA-44 Seminole, introduced in 1978, was a stretched version of the twin-engine Arrow with a twin tail.

The museum began as a branch of the Lock Haven Heisey Historical Museum in the 1980's.

Piper opened its T1000 Airline Division at the Lakeland, Florida, location in May 1981, with 20 people.

1983: The Malibu is introduced.

Piper Aviation announced the closing of the Lock Haven facility in March 1984.

Through the efforts of Cal Arter in 1986, the PA Museum Commission gifted a tractor trailer mobile museum to the Piper Aviation Museum group.

In 1987, New York buyout firm Forstmann Little & Company acquired Piper.

Industry-wide sales were just 1,143 planes in 1989, and Piper's main competitors Cessna and Beech Aircraft had stopped making small piston engine planes.

Most of the company's 1,600 employees were furloughed in February 1990 as rumors of bankruptcy circulated.

The firm went bankrupt in July 1991.

In 1992, Angus Stone Douglass, a businessman with ties to New Jersey criminal-politicians, bought all of Piper's common stock from Millar for $500,000 cash through his Duck's Nest Investment firm.

Production of the flagship Cheyenne 400 ended in February 1993 with only 43 being built since its inception a decade earlier.

The whole United States general aviation industry sold only 444 planes in 1994.

Teledyne (later named Allegheny) and Philly investment firm Dimeling Schreiber & Park bought Piper for $95 million in March 1995, renaming it The New Piper Aircraft, Inc.

In the fall of 1997, Piper announced it was developing a new single engine turboprop, the Malibu Meridian.

New Piper sold 303 planes in 1998 and had revenues of $125 million that year.

The industry as a whole sold 2,816 planes worth $8.6 billion in 2000.

In July 2003, American Capital Strategies, Ltd. bought 94% of Piper's voting equity.

In July 2006, a partnership with Honda was announced to market the new HA-420 HondaJet.

The Great Recession struck in 2007 and deeply impacted their airplane orders and workforce.

He’s “tweeted” over 10,000 times since joining Twitter in 2009 and posts frequently on his Instagram account, where he has over 18,000 followers.

On 4 January 2010, the company announced Boeing subsidiary Aviall would act as Piper's sole global parts distributor.

He flew it until 2011, then picked Bipe Inc.—an antique airplane restoration company in North Carolina—to do a ground-up restoration of the historic airplane.

Drew McEwen was appointed Piper's Vice President of Sales and Marketing in May 2013 and leads leading global sales and marketing for the company.

Piper and one of our dealers there, Hanxing General Aviation Co., Ltd., exhibited a new unpressurized piston-powered Piper Matrix at Airshow China 2014, held last November in Zhuhai.

In July 2015 the company announced it was laying off 15-20% of its workers, about 150 people, as sales were faltering amongst world markets, especially Asia, Latin America and Europe.

In February 2018, Piper announced the largest order of trainer aircraft in the company's history.

In April 2019 an even bigger order was announced: L3 Commercial Aviation will take delivery up to 240 new aircraft over the next ten years.