Piper's 35 year old mistake

AOPA's weekly email pointed out a recent Airworthiness Directive request made by New Piper to fix a slight problem in the documentation for the PA28R-200 (the airplane I got my complex endorsement in).

Seems the Pilot's Operating Handbook incorrectly states that you should avoid continuous prop RPMs of 2,100 to 2,350 when it was supposed to say 2,000 to 2,350. The fix to this error is to ether install a placard stating the correct range to avoid or replace the entire tachometer.

Apparently there have been no troubles with the airplane that can be attributed to this oversight, but they still want to force owners to at least pay the $35 bucks for the placard. AOPA is trying to prevent that.

Thankfully this was never a problem for me in the few hours I flew the retractable Arrow – I always had the RPMs at 2400 or higher unless I was landing when they’d be lower than 2,000.

Incidentally, the Arrow was one of the first general aviation planes to have auto-extending landing gear - if you got too slow with the gear up they'd auto-deploy. Meant to prevent gear-up landings they had the problem of dropping the draggy gear out into the slipstream in the event of a engine-out glide.

The best glide speed was higher than the auto-gear-deploy speed, but apparently it was easy to get a little slow and have the gear come out. This greatly reduced the already impressively poor glide distance when you needed it the most. A few lawsuits later and the system was disabled on most/all Arrows from then on.

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