The first “high-performance” airplane I flew was a brand-new 1975 Piper Arrow II. With its businesslike green-and-black-and-white paint scheme (the color of money, you know) and that certain air that all retractable-gear airplanes had in my mind, I was smitten. And it was a nice airplane, though now that I think about it, it wasn’t all that different from the Warrior that I flew all the time. There was a little lever on the panel for making the wheels go up and down-that was cool-and there was an extra lever on the power quadrant for changing the pitch of the prop. It did go a bit faster than the Warrior, 15 or 20 knots or so, and there were a few other differences, but nothing that leapt out. I guess it just didn’t take much-a few extra knots and some levers to play with-to make me, or a lot of other pilots, happy.
High-performance singles have really come a long, long way since then, and one of the cream of the current crop is Lancair’s latest, the Columbia 350, which is about 50 knots faster than the Arrow, without, by the way, tucking the gear.
