Piper Dakota Refurb

[Applause] so you're looking at a Piper Cherokee here and what's special about this after all Piper built 32,000 of them well people know Cherokees will tell you that this is a PA 28 to 36 or a piper Dakota and what made the dakota different was that it had a six-cylinder engine a 235 horsepower lycoming in place of the 180 horsepower 4-cylinder like humming what's special about this airplane is that it's a complete refurbishment called the premiere edition dakota it's done by a well known shop at Brookridge over on the east coast of florida called premier aviation with a Corbin halloran of premiere and before we come back and look at the cockpit here and look at some of the avionics that have been installed we're going to hear from Barry Ruth Heiser about the premiere edition dakota project in general what we do in the dakota program is we look for a low time no damage history dakota from 79 to 85 we bring it to our shop we vet it carefully we then put it through a very thorough and comprehensive annual now all annuals are supposed to be comprehensive but as many of us know they're not and many times many time life items are missed not done and our our annual on a premier edition dakota costs anywhere from fifteen to twenty thousand dollars we do it all the airplanes taken down to bare metal the aircraft engine has taken off and sent to our engine shop where it's rebuilt to new standards with new lycoming cylinders take off the old two bladed prop and put on a Hartzell three bladed prop but the interior is completely gutted we put in either an interior of wool carpeting and leather seats or nylon carpeting and nylon seats the instrument panel is kind of a la carte we offer several different versions of avionics going from silver a gold and platinum they're all Gorman to the latest and greatest everything on the airplane is covered by a manufacturer's warranty every major component prop the engine the paint the pricing is for our Silver Edition goes starts at about 259 to our Platinum Edition which is 329 in the middle is the Gold Edition which is 269 to 79 basically that what drives the price most are the avionics now having said that some people have opted to buy the planes we purchased that we were going to refurbish and just refer refurbishment refurbish them to an ala carte limit in other words we do the premiere edition annual and then we will add in a different two specs amount of avionics and those prices can be from 120 to 175 so now you've seen what the Dakota premier Edition is all about as far as a refurbishment let's talk about the airplane itself well I have a Dakota in the first place but the co2 really did to sell a lot of airframes but it was very popular among the people who bought it because it carries a hell of a lot goes a little faster well actually goes a lot faster than the pa-28 180 and it just has general generally better performance so Corbin let's talk about the performance in this airplane you've just completed it so this is really it's a solid 130 240 not airplane yeah yeah so we coming over here today we saw the airspeed 6,500 feet 42 knots 75% pirate and we're just breaking the engine in so it will run a little bit more fuel through it but but the the books got you around 14 gallons we're pushing about fifteen and a half to sixteen so once it's broken and I think our surveys have shown that most owners fly these things at about 12 to 13 gallons an hour I was there in a hurry yeah okay so in this airplane we looked at the weight balance and the useful load on this airplane I think was around 1180 that's correct okay so that means that in the coda like this this is typical of decoders if you could put 470 pounders in the seats and you still have room for home fuel and probably 40 pounds of baggage and if you if you've down to you a little bit you could put the poor people in with a lot of baggage if you don't have people are to go yeah that's right you got 72 usable gallons so that's what 420 plus or 30 pounds of fuel and then you got the additional weight as well yeah so if you got two people you can practically fly with anything you could get in it and you've got the rain I think I calculate it out around 700 miles correct pretty comfortably okay so Barry talked about the various avionics options that are available and the dakota premier digit i'm going to turn around here and show you the camera so this thing is pretty well pricked out it's got a garmin g500 it's got the JPI EDM and as your engine monitor and one of the first things you notice when you get in this airplane if you look down on the lower panel what's missing well there are no engine gauges and there's no power gauges so that's all included in the EDM and it's all digital and let's see that's got it's got it's got fuel flow it's got leaning capability it's got engine monitoring trends all kinds of stuff in that unit and then we got down lower we have the Sandia it's the SI i 340 it's a solid-state gyro and I guess that's required as a backup for the garment is that right yeah you want to have that as a secondary piece for IFR or nighttime fly and for primary communication and navigation we have the Garmin GTN 650 you could have a 750 if you want their room port and we've got for a backup we've got the Garmin's digital navcom of the 225 and then there's an S tech which s tech autopilot is is this the 55 X 55 X so this is a full week couple bottle pilot for ipar proaches and everything that's a nice ride and then for a transponder it's a ABS be out capable transponder over the end as well with the is B weather one performance one thing you do notice with the six cylinder lycoming is when you advance the throttle on the runway you can tell you're not sitting behind a four cylinder it really accelerates quickly it rotates quickly and climbs well 1200 foot climb very easy with the airplane now fully loaded so that big like homing it's a over 540 makes a huge difference the GoPro doesn't have smell-o-vision so you can't tell but this is a smell like a new airplane it's got a looks like a leather interior and it's got all these side panels and carpet lots of new stuff in here most of the controls a lot of the switches are new it's got a nice leather clad yoke just all kinds of nice little touches in this thing to make it almost indistinguishable from new and the attraction there is as Barry said is the price because well the new Archer or really any new airplane has a ah smaller than there is money of a known universe so that's why used airplanes have the attraction they do and this one would be half price if Piper made the Dakota today Berry said he thought they could sell in I agree it would probably sell but it might be a $600,000 or $550,000 airplane so that goes to show you what kind of value you have in this airplane so we've been out here and joined dodging the showers off the coast of Florida you like to find out more about the dakota premiere vision you can go on the website at premier aircraft comm thanks for watching [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Aviation Consumer magazine

Views: 20,640

Rating: 4.9833331 out of 5

Keywords: Premier Edition Dakota, Piper Dakota refurbishment, Aviation Consumer

Id: _ZasSvUhfNk

Length: 9min 1sec (541 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 05 2017