When Piper announced back in early November that it was going to produce an unpressurized, roughly $750,000 version of its Mirage six-place pressurized piston single, the reaction from the media was, well, downright tepid.
At face value it seemed as though Piper was merely trying to lower the price point of its million-dollar-plus, cabin-class, pressurized offering while still keeping the Mirage a viable product. And worst of all, it was doing it simply by subtracting some value from it, in the form of pressurization. After all, the critics asked, how much can it cost to put the pressurization system in an airframe already built to be pressurized? The whole Matrix exercise seemed like a cynical marketing ploy designed to drum up a few more PA-46 sales, nothing more. One aviation publication even referred to it as a “deflated Mirage” and asked, “Does the world really need an unpressurized Mirage?”
