2025 FLYING Buyers Guide: Pistons

Slowly increasing availability of unleaded avgas is among the market developments for piston-engine airplanes.

Rick Durden

Tuesday, March 18, 2025 at 01:57 PM ET

Verified

Edited By:

Ryan Ewing

CubCrafters XCub [Courtesy: CubCrafters]

Key Takeaways:

The piston aircraft market saw varied performance, with strong sales for Cirrus's upgraded SR series and robust demand for popular trainers like the Cessna 172, Piper Archer, and Tecnam P-Mentor.
Diamond Aircraft achieved significant growth in its diesel-powered twin sales (DA42/DA62), indicating a demand for owner-flown piston twins, contrasting with stagnant sales of traditional avgas piston twins.
The availability of unleaded avgas is slowly increasing, expected to reduce maintenance costs, while the electric airplane market remains nascent with minimal sales but is being monitored for technological advancements.

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Along with market developments for piston-engine airplanes, we are also closely watching the slowly increasing availability of unleaded avgas. The benefits should affect aircraft owners in terms of lowered maintenance costs as the harmful effects of lead on engines go away.

Sales of the Cirrus Aircraft SR series increased to 419 through the third quarter of 2024 over 389 in the same period of 2023. Cirrus is riding a wave of success. It introduced the latest version of the SR series (G7) early in 2024, and it proved popular. The upgrade included touchscreen interfaces, larger, high-resolution displays, advanced safety systems, improved visibility, more legroom, and the Cirrus IQ mobile app that provides remote access to real-time health and readiness information about the aircraft.