I don't know the history of Comanches, but it seems like it would sell today. It's a shame they discontinued it.
Absolutely. Without the flood, I think the PA24-180 would have been dropped in favor of the Arrow just due to production costs and their other similarities, although given the timeline of the Arrow it's possible that the Arrow was developed because of the flood's impact on the Comanche. However, the 260C would have likely continued to sell well at least until the 2000s brought competition from Cirrus, and the 400 probably would have continued to sell in smaller numbers and nabbed some of that Cirrus audience.
The Twin Comanche would have probably lasted at least through 1974, when the PA-40 Arapaho was certified. However, Piper's excuse for not putting that into production was that they didn't want to establish a new production line during a recession, so they may have continued with the PA-39 Twin Comanche CR at least until 1979's introduction of the Seminole. However, IMO it would have been a dumb move to replace the Twin Comanche with the Seminole - The Seminole is simpler and easier to produce, yes, but it also performs like crap in comparison, and has pretty much always been solely in the trainer role because of that while the Twin Comanche has always been a sought-after personal airplane in addition to being used extensively as a multi trainer.
I think (and I'm sure I'll be corrected) that a flood in Lockhaven destroyed a lot of the tooling and Piper decided it wasn't worth the capital expense to re-tool to produce more. IIRC.
Nope, you're correct. The remnants of Hurricane Agnes caused a huge flood on the Susquehanna and the water crested 16 feet above the factory floor. Piper had been producing the Cherokee line in Vero Beach for over a decade by this point and they were far simpler and cheaper to produce.
The Comanche was more difficult and expensive to produce versus the new Cherokee models, so Piper was looking to get out anyway. The flood was a convenient excuse to take the insurance money and run.
Yeah... But man, they never came up with real replacements for the Comanche line. The 24-180 eventually got replaced by the Arrow and those were probably the most similar. The 24-260 and 24-400 didn't really have any analogs in Piper's lineup, so the "poor man's Bonanza" went away. The 8-cylinder 400hp variant was tough to properly cool via air cooling and obviously had higher operating costs because of that and fuel burn, which is probably why you don't see many 400hp singles from anyone before or since. The 260hp Comanche compares favorably with an awful lot of other airplanes and would have sold well for a long time.
The Twin Comanche would have theoretically been replaced by the Arapaho as mentioned above, but in reality both were replaced by the Seneca, which was further developed into the turbocharged fixed-wastegate Seneca II. The turbo system makes it a horrible trainer, and while it has a mission, if you look at the mission of the Twinkie as a trainer plus a four-place personal traveling aircraft, the Seneca is a bit of a pig when used for those missions.
I think if they had been able to make production simpler for the twin, and add some of the Miller mods and maybe even R-STOL mods, they'd have had a very competitive twin at least up through the 2004 introduction of the Diamond TwinStar.
