The Prototype

Every airplane begins as an idea

From the outside, Norm and Peg Johnson’s plane, N2024P, looks a lot like mine, N7791P. It should. It’s a PA24, or Piper Comanche, both with the same sleek lines and solid performance. But Norm and Peg’s plane is different from mine in a very significant way. My plane came off an assembly line in 1962, serial number 24-3008. Their plane was handcrafted from scratch in 1956. It is, in fact, the very first Comanche, the prototype, serial number 24-1. 

         When Norm saw a for-sale listing for N2024P in 2016, he knew it was something special. It’s rare is it for a prototype of a production model aircraft to still exist, much less be airworthy. The few that are, such as Boeing’s prototype 707, are on display at a museum (in the case of Boeing’s Dash 80, the National Air & Space Museum). 

         For Norm, a lifelong Lock Haven resident who worked at the Piper Aircraft plant from 1959-60 and who owns and flies another Piper Comanche, N6317P, the prototype Comanche was not just a part of aviation history, but a part of his personal history. “I knew I wanted this plane, if I could get it for the right price,” he says.

         The genesis of Comanche 24-1, like any aircraft prototype, began as an idea. What is this plane’s purpose? To fly faster? Higher? Father? Carry more? Do it for less? Do it more safely? Or just look better doing it? 

         By the mid-1950s, Piper Aircraft had made a name for itself making tube-and-fabric classics such as the Cup and Tri-Pacer. While fine planes, they couldn’t carry that much, weren’t that fast and looked, well, dated. Rivals such as Cessna and Beechcraft were making slick-looking planes of all-metal construction and tricycle gear; planes that were easier to fly, could carry four people in relative comfort and fly much faster. 

The prototype, with its original trailing link 

gear system.

To catch up, company founder and chairman William T. Piper first turned outside the company. He approached designer and entrepreneur Al Mooney, whom he learned had a design for a four-place single engine retractable that he planned to put into production, the M20. Piper offered to buy the design, but Mooney wouldn’t sell. Legend has it that Piper either hired Mooney to do a preliminary design for a new plane, or that the company got its hands on one of the new Mooneys and “borrowed” many of the design features. The aircraft do have a lot in common. Both planes are low-wing and low-to-the-ground. Both planes have tapered, laminar flow wings, and early photographs of N2024P show the planes both had a trailing-link landing gear design, which Piper later swapped out for a straight oleo gear design for production models.         

          But whereas the Mooney had wood and fabric covered wings, the Comanche had all-metal wings. The Mooney had a steel tube cage surrounding the cockpit while the Comanche was of monocoque design, in which the metal skin and ribbed skeleton provided the aircrafts structural strength. The Mooney had a distinctive forward-swept vertical tail fin; the Comanche had rearward swept tail with a horizontal stabilator, in which the entire airfoil moved to control pitch, rather than a more conventional hinged elevator. The Comanche was also roomier than the Mooney. 

         For Piper, the Comanche was a bold statement of its entry into the modern era. Stylish and sleek, it looks like a muscle car with wings, a plane that could—and 64 years on still can—turn heads. Even when parked on the tarmac, it looks like it’s flying. 

         The Comanche 24-1 first took flight in May 1956, powered by a 4-cylinder, 180hp Lycoming engine. A second prototype, 24-2, first flew in October 1956. In addition to swapping out the landing gear system, engineers replaced an ineffective rudder trim tab (a bendable strip of metal attached to the rudder) with a mechanical system linked to the rudder pedals. To improve handling, a stronger, heavier tail was developed. The first production Comanche, N5000P, 24-3, came off the assembly line in September 1957. That aircraft is also still flying, though it now bears Canadian registration C-GCDN. 

         Check in hand, Norm flew to Massachusetts to pick up N2024P in his other Comanche, N6317P, accompanied by fellow Comanche owner and flight instructor John Spencer. With Spencer at the controls of 17P, Norm flew the Comanche 24-1. Flying about a mile in trail behind Spencer, Norm quickly got his first indication of the task facing him to restore the plane when both the vacuum system and radios failed, making the hazy two-hour flight home a real challenge.

         Back in his hangar, Norm began taking the plane apart. He discovered birds nests in the wings; paint was worn to bare metal; the landing gear system was in need of a complete overhaul; baggage and cabin doors were ill-fitting and hung loosely from their hinges (Norm speculated the original cabin door was fitted with explosive bolts in case parachute-equipped test pilots needed to make a hasty escape). 

         The official Comanche parts and repair manual was at best a rough guide for the plane. Some parts were simply missing while others were improvised by factory engineers. In some cases components that needed to be riveted in place were instead glued, an indication to Johnson that the company never meant for the plane to be more than a test bed destined to be scrapped when test pilots and engineers were done with it. 

         Mystery access plates in the fuselage and holes in the firewall remain where engineers installed test equipment or experimented with different design features. Aircraft logs for N2024P list a total of eight different engines hung on the airframe for testing, including a 265hp Lycoming that never went into production. 

Norm and Peg Johnston.

For Comanche aficionados, another interesting difference with Comanche 24-1 is the tail design. Instead of the cast aluminum horn and tubular aluminum spar installed on all factory-made Comanches, a design in which the components  became subject of an FAA airworthiness directive 40 years after production ended in 1972, Comanche 24-1 has a completely unique components including a milled aluminum horn and chromed aluminum tube, components that exempt it from the FAA directive.

         FAA records indicate that from 1956-62, Piper flew 24P a total of 598 hours. With its run as a test bed over, Piper sold the plane rather than scrap it or donate it to an aviation mechanic school. Norm speculates the company may have needed the cash. Piper always seemed to flirt with financial disaster. In the two years he spent at the company, Norm says, employment shrank dramatically. 

         In order to move the plane from “experimental” category to “normal” category for the sale, Piper had to remove all the equipment not listed in its federal certification. This included pilot-side toe brakes, an option that became pretty much standard on production models after 1960. 

         A total of 4,857 Comanche singles were produced between 1958 and 1972 in six variants with five different engine types—all Lycoming—from the four-cylinder 180hp model to six-cylinder 250hp and 260hp fuel-injected and 260hp turbocharged models to an eight-cylinder, 400hp beast of an engine. Piper decided to cease production following the flooding of the Susquehanna River in 1972, which damaged much of the tooling on the Comanche line. Though the Comanche had a solid following, the plane never became the Bonanza beater the company had hoped for. As the overall market shrank and production numbers dwindled, Piper figured that the Comanche was not cost-effective to produce. 

         The company decided to focus production on the simpler, four-place Piper Cherokee, a plane that had one-third less parts than the Comanche and whose straight cord, or “Hershey Bar” wing, could be used as the platform for an entire line of aircraft. The Cherokee went on to be one of the best-selling aircraft of all time, with more than 32,000 made and counting. 

         After spending what they figure was 8,000 hours of work over the course of four years—doing everything from the major mechanical work to stripping and repainting the plane to updating the instrument panel and redoing the interior—Norm and Peg Johnson will soon make their first official flight in the reborn N2024P. And the fact that they can is testament to the dedication of Comanche owners and the timelessness of the design.

         Asked if he knew before he bought N2024P how much time, sweat and money it took to restore it, Norm, “I’m not sure I would, but it’s nice knowing the plane is back home, three thousand feet from the place it was built.”

 

 

Data plate, bearing serial number 24-1.