AOPA Pilot Magazine
February 2004 Volume 47 / Number 2
AOPA's Win-A-Twin Sweepstakes: Win-A-Twin Comanche
Remaking a classic from the ground up
Welcome to the 2004 edition of AOPA's annual sweepstakes. While our last sweepstakes airplane — a 1940 Waco UPF-7 biplane — ventured deep into the vault of classic designs, this year's airplane takes us back into more recent history. But like the Waco, this airplane's a classic, too. It's a fully restored 1965 Piper Twin Comanche. Or should I say it "will be" a fully restored Twin Comanche. As with previous sweeps projects, this one will require a massive overhaul / refurbishment / cleanup / modernization to bring it up to the standards we've all come to expect. Why a Twin Comanche? First of all, in the 10 years that AOPA has been conducting sweepstakes drawings of refurbished aircraft, all have been single-engine airplanes. We wanted to delve into the world of light twins and yet stay in the classic genre. For many AOPA members, the Twin Comanche represents the ultimate light twin, and it was the step-up twin of choice in the 1960s — when general aviation was booming and light twins were in their heyday.
The search for the candidate airplane began last summer. We scoured online sources, Trade-A-Plane, ASO.com, word-of-mouth leads, you name it, to find our airplane. Believe me, the results were disappointing. For a time, despair reigned.
Piper built some 2,000 of the original variants of the Twin Comanche — type designator PA-30 — between 1963 and 1969. Now those airplanes are getting long in the tooth, having served as multiengine trainers and step-up twins in thousands of hours of often punishing work. Twin Comanches — affectionately dubbed "Twinkies" or "TwinCos" — may have been the apple of many a pilot's eye in the Kennedy-Johnson years, but now most of them are in sorry shape. We wanted to bring a faded — but not yet moribund — Twinkie back to like-new status.
Our search revealed three loose categories of used Twin Comanches on today's market: the Basket Case, the Beater, and the Beauty. Basket Cases are often rusting carcasses, complete with flat tires, rotten interiors, and a huge array of missing parts. You can buy one of these babies for a mere $20,000, or even less, but you'll have a mountain of work ahead of you before it ever takes flight.
The Beater goes for $60,000 to $75,000 or so. Its looks are long gone, and it needs some work, but there's still some life left in the old bird.
The Beauty is well equipped, looks great, is hangared, and has an owner who is fastidious about maintenance. It goes for $100,000 and up.
The Basket Cases made us depressed, and the Beauties cost too much, so we zeroed in on Beaters. This kept the acquisition cost down, leaving us with a decent budget for the spruce-up. Boy, there were a lot of beaters. And boy, were they beat. One guy advertised his Beater at $72,000, claiming low time on the airframe and engines, and tender care. The ugly truth: rust on the cylinder walls. Another wanted $69,000 for his hail-damaged Twinkie. (By the way, hail damage is common among older Comanches and Twin Comanches, and easily inflicted by virtue of these airplanes' thin skins.) Anyway, it would have cost us more than $50,000 — and weeks of work — just to reskin the airplane! Another owner claimed a fresh annual by a mechanic on his home field, yet balked mightily when we asked that an impartial mechanic have a look.
AOPA Pilot Associate Editor Steve Ells finally located our airplane at Salinas Municipal Airport in California. While it had certainly seen better days, N7625Y was in relatively good shape for a Twinkie with 5,400 hours on its airframe and 1,300 hours on each of its engines. (At least, this is what numerous Twin Comanche experts have told us over and over.) "It's a good airplane," said Larry Larkin, a guru among Twin Comanche instructors, and a key player in the International Comanche Society (ICS) — the premier enthusiast organization for Comanche and Twin Comanche owners. All airworthiness directives had been complied with, the small amounts of visible corrosion were only of cosmetic concern, there was no hail damage, and it had a recent annual inspection. At $67,500, the price seemed right, so the deal was made.
The other side of the story
Still, the wear and tear of 38 years had taken its toll, providing us with a number of repair and refurbishment tasks. A background check of the airplane's ownership trail showed that it served as a multiengine trainer for the U.S. Air Force in the late 1960s. Like so many other Twin Comanches, its duty as a trainer gave it a hard life, adding hundreds of hours worth of student abuse to the airframe. Then came a spate of owners who obviously used the airplane in hard IFR conditions. That would explain the ice damage to the nose, caused by the left engine's propeller flinging shed ice at the nose.
Then there was the gear-up incident. Like almost every retractable-gear airplane with this many years and hours (one Twinkie we looked at had five gear-up landings), the logs showed a "gear collapse during landing roll," in 1986. While the damage was repaired, there are repairs and there are repairs. This repair job left the nose-gear doors with some unsightly kinks, and the reskinning of the belly damage looks like overkill. There are rows of extra rivets where new belly skin was affixed to the fuselage. To the untrained eye, these rivets are unobtrusive, but for a well-schooled Comanche devotee — or mechanic — it doesn't meet concours standards. Still, it's a good repair. To return the belly to like-new condition would entail removing the wings, according to several Comanche experts — something we don't feel is necessary at this point.
First flights
I arrived at San Luis Obispo's San Luis County Regional Airport to pick up our Twin Comanche, get a familiarization flight from ex-owner (and retired airline captain) Jim Gordon, and ferry the airplane across the country to LoPresti Speed Merchants at Vero Beach Municipal Airport in Florida. Ells — Pilot's West Coast editor, and a pilot and airframe and powerplant mechanic — would accompany me across the country.
While LoPresti is well known for its speed mods — all of which will grace the reborn sweeps Twinkie — it's also a shop that's experienced in most other airframe maintenance procedures. There's a lot of Comanche and Twin Comanche expertise there, too. LoPresti holds more than 40 supplemental type certificates involving airframe mods, has a 20,000-square-foot hangar facility, and has state-of-the-art computer-assisted design and manufacturing capabilities.
Our three-day, severe-clear odyssey began with a leg from San Luis Obispo to El Paso. Almost immediately after liftoff, our upgrade opportunities met us full-face. By the time we were cruising at 9,500 feet over the Tehachapi mountain range in Southern California, we knew the engines had "issues." For one, I couldn't get the left propeller to sync up with the right. Obviously, the left prop governor was, if not inoperative, then definitely out to lunch. So for hours over the desert, it was the discordant waaaah, waaaah, waaaah of the out-of-phase propellers. Any correction on my part would only last for a few minutes. Then it was back to waaaah, waaaah, waaaah.
Then there was the ill-fitting door. A rather large air leak made the cockpit a deafening environment, but we coped with the help of active noise-canceling headsets — and a roll of duct tape.
Over the Arizona desert, both engines began to vibrate so badly that our "flight management system" — a Garmin GPS III Pilot — began to rythmically hop up and down on top of the glareshield. "This thing's got the shakes," Ells proclaimed, in what would become a string of colorfully frank comments — most of which can't appear in this magazine. Indeed, several times the III Pilot was a blur.
Of course, we did have the ship's creaky old avionics serving us, but their performance was spotty, too. The TKM nav/coms, for example, had problems reeling in most VOR stations from distances much beyond 40 miles or so.
At a fuel stop at the Phoenix Goodyear Airport the engines backfired with a passion while taxiing. "Mixtures aren't set up right," said Ells. Aggressive leaning helped, but an occasional rumble would turn heads on the ramp. In El Paso, the left engine ran rough after landing — hell, it quit during the landing rollout — so we had the spark plugs removed and cleaned. Turns out they were fouled with oil.
By the time we reached Florida, we knew the airplane well. Yes, it was old and well used. But it was a solid performer — and one that needed some TLC. The odd thing was that the prop governors and engine vibrations seemed to settle down after an hour or so in the air. "Thing just doesn't like the ground ... engines all gummed up ... thing kind of shakes itself off and says, 'Oh, I'm supposed to fly now,' after cruising for a while," Ells offered.
That TLC is being applied at this very moment, starting with the engines. By the time you read this, Superior Air Parts will have provided the components for the engines to be completely overhauled at Penn Yan Aero in New York, all engine accessories will have been replaced with new units, and many other firewall-forward issues will have been addressed. It's the first step in what will be a huge work package tailored to make this Twin Comanche one of the finest in the world. And it could be yours.
E-mail the author at tom.horne@aopa.org.
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