As motoring enthusiasts look upon Chevrolet, Ford, and Chrysler as the U.S. Automotive Industry’s Big Three, so aircraft aficionados revere Cessna, Beechcraft, and Piper as the holy trinity of America’s General Aviation aircraft marques.
Cessna and Beechcraft, though active, still, in the production of light G.A. airplanes, have devoted the larger parts of their design and manufacturing faculties to their CitationJet and King Air aircraft families respectively.
Piper, despite offering impressive turbine machines the likes of the M500 and M600/SLS, has remained, at its heart, a builder of piston-engine airplanes eminently conducive to flight-training.
For generations, the world’s aviators, to include your humble author, learned to fly, instructed in, and even earned their ATPs in Piper’s timeless, Warrior, Tomahawk, Archer, Comanche, Saratoga, Seminole, and Seneca models.
Comes now 2023, and Piper’s Pilot 100i, Archer DX and TX—descendants, all, of the company’s storied PA-28 Cherokee aircraft family—account for a significant percentage of the worldwide fleet of single-engine training aircraft.
Similarly, Piper’s PA-44-180 Seminole piston-twin-engine airplane—of which well over 950 have been delivered since the model’s 1979 debut—remains among the world’s most prolific and popular multi-engine training platforms.
Piper announced at 2023’s SUN ‘n FUN Aerospace Expo that it was to be the first aircraft OEM to offer Garmin’s PlaneSync as a factory option. Made public by Garmin on 24 April 2023, PlaneSync is a connected aircraft management system that automatically updates avionics databases, logs flight and engine data, and allows aircraft owners/operators to remotely check a host aircraft’s status—to include the integrity and currency of its navigational databases; Hobbs, tachometer, and flight times; fuel quantity; battery voltage; OAT; oil temperature; and aircraft GPS location—by dint of the Garmin Pilot app or a D2 Mach 1 smartwatch.
PlaneSync is compatible with popular avionics such as the company’s GTN Xi series navigators, TXi series flight displays, GI 275 electronic flight instruments, and select Garmin integrated flight decks.
PlaneSync will be upgraded in early 2024 to automatically transmit engine and flight log data to secure cloud storage after the host aircraft lands.
Convenient for flying clubs or multiple-owner aircraft, service subscribers may assign access for additional users to view aircraft status.
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