July 2013

If at first you don’t succeed, don’t “tri” again. But Piper’s trimotor testing wasn’t all for naught.

What do you do when you’ve completed initial testing of a new version of your wildly popular single-engine aircraft? If you’re Piper Aircraft in the 1960s, you slap a couple more engines on it and try it out as a trimotor.

That’s just what happened in 1964. Piper had completed initial tests on its PA-32-260 Cherokee Six and used that airframe to attach two more engines to the wings (in this case using the 115 hp Lycoming O-235) while retaining the 250 hp Lycoming O-540 of the “Six” for the center engine.