Piper PA-28 Cherokee

So just because you don't see a Cessna 172 or a Piper and they're not brand new, don't discount it.

And there is a lot to be said for a well-maintained legacy airframe like a Cherokee 140 or an old Piper Archer.

Those things are bulletproof.

Yeah, well, and plus, if you are thinking from the get-go here, when you define your goal of what you want to do with this private pilot certificate, you may already have a particular aircraft in mind that you eventually want to own.

... cocaine, and then stick that in the back of your...

PA28.

PA28.

And smoke it.

I got, I got searched once.

... uh, what is it, a Beechcraft or something? Uh-

Very, uh, it was a, a Piper Arrow.

Piper Arrow.

Very, very well-kept.

Yeah.

really cool yeah did you learn to fly i don't know if it matters high wing low wing cessna piper it

was a piper warrior

piper warrior yeah nice yeah very cool

it was i i enjoyed it a lot

yeah

Here is the practical takeaway right now.

None of this affects your Cessna 172, your Piper Cherokee, your experimental home-built.

The regulatory environment for small GA aircraft is not going to shift based on a cargo autonomy demonstration.

Your certificate, your flying, your relationship with the airspace is not under any near-term pressure from this technology.

So I definitely check that out and you can go online and look up different websites that will actually guide you to different airports and what they have to offer.

So there's plenty of ways to get involved in that if you're starting out brand new, but yeah i mean it just grows you know you start off with something really small and i'll tell you what like the plane that i actually started my training on was um a piper cherokee which is what we see in goldfinger uh during the uh pussy galore's flying circus so all of those little airplanes that did that scene going over fort knox that that was actually in i believe I'm pretty sure it's around the same year as the plane that I flew.

I think it was like a late 60s model, in fact, that I flew.

That's so neat.

Otago Southland reporter Katie Todd has more.

On December 29, 1978, a single-engine Piper Cherokee VI took off from Dunedin's Tidey Airfield for a scenic flight through the Southern Fjords.

28-year-old pilot Edward Ned Morrison, five members of the Dunedin-based Stewart family, and 20-year-old David Hogg were on board.

As bad weather rolled in from the Tasman Sea, the plane vanished, never to be seen again.

we've been doing sonar searches of the lake and that we came across an object that measures about the size of the plane.

We believe that it's in about five metres of water.

If the Piper Cherokee crashed in the lake, he says, the twisted fuselage doors would have trapped everyone inside.

The group handed their sonar evidence to police, who will be deploying Defense Force divers and Coast Guard teams to try and find the object next week.