It’s a rare airplane that appears on the scene and hangs on, long after production has ended, not as a nod to nostalgia but because the airplane keeps letting pilots (or their bosses) do things they want to do. Be it making money transporting people and packages deep into mountainous terrain, keeping an eye on the coastline or pipeline, or simply providing a rough and ready way to get to cool places for no good reason at all, these few timeless birds defy the passing of the seasons and the years.
The Piper Super Cub is the airplane that arguably best epitomizes this. Just a few degrees of separation from the tube-and-rag Piper Cub, the Super Cub was an outgrowth of the PA-11 Cub Special, an airplane that made clear what Piper customers had been asking for — more power and payload — and it was indeed a very good idea.
