Piper 75th Anniversary

Yesterday I was invited to the Piper Aircraft 75th Anniversary event at the Vero Beach (Florida) airport where the Piper factory is.

It was a fly-in with lots of visiting airplanes. Many Pipers were there, including over 20 of my favorite aircraft, the one which put Piper on the map, the J3 Piper Cub!

 

 

We flew in early morning form Miami’s Tamiami airport (KTMB), about 130 miles from Vero Beach Municipal Airport (KVRB) in a friend’s Cessna 182.

It was a wonderful flight. It took a little more than an hour as we had headwinds and our effective ground speed was about 117mph. The return trip had a tailwind so we made a ground speed of 130mph at times.

The flight path took us over the Florida Everglades as you have to fly way west of town to avoid entering the airspace of Miami International (KMIA), Ft. Lauderdale (KFLL) and Palm Beach (KPBI). We had a wonderful view of Lake Okeechobee

The event was a blast. They had a reception in a huge hangar with vendor booths (I bought a Piper Cub hat and T-shirt).

There were speeches by the President of Piper, Mr. Simon Caldecott, and the Director of the American Cancer Society, who received a check from Piper with donations received during the special campaign (they even painted a Piper Malibu pink), in support of October Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

We saw a video of Piper’s history, how it went from the early beginnings by the Taylor Family as the Taylor Brothers Aircraft Manufacturing Company in September 1927, which was then joined by oil industry engineer William T. Piper in 1929. Piper, often called “the Henry Ford of Aviation”, instituted simpler manufacturing methods.

In 1935, Piper bought out C.G. Taylor and in 1937 renamed the company Piper Aircraft Corporation.

We also received a guided tour of the factory (no photography allowed inside). This was a one-hour long tour where we visited almost all the manufacturing and assembly areas. Piper is vertically integrated , producing most of the parts in-house, except tires, avionics instruments and windshields.

It was a great experience to see the machinery and work that goes into building different models of airplanes, from raw parts  to flight testing.

I shot lots of images, which are in my gallery. Here are a few of them:

 

and finally a group picture of the four people that flew in my friend’s Yale Cessna, with a Super Cub on floats as background:

(Alex, Dave, Yale and Rick)