Seven hundred and sixty-one dollars

In late 1930, as the Great Depression bit, a small aeroplane maker in Bradford, Pennsylvania, went bankrupt. A local oil-industry engineer named William T. Piper, who had put $400 into the firm a year earlier, bought its assets for $761. Piper was a Harvard graduate and Army veteran with no background in aircraft, but he believed a cheap, simple aeroplane could sell even in the worst of times. That aeroplane was the little E-2 Cub, and Piper’s bet made him, in the press of his day, the Henry Ford of aviation.

From a burnt-out mill to the Grasshopper

The company he bought had been founded in September 1927 in Rochester, New York, by the brothers Clarence and Gordon Taylor. Gordon was killed in April 1928 flying one of their own designs, and C. G. Taylor stayed on as president until a series of clashes ended with Piper buying him out in December 1935. Then, in March 1937, fire destroyed the Bradford factory. Piper moved into an abandoned silk mill at Lock Haven and renamed the business Piper Aircraft Corporation. From there came the J-3 Cub, more than 19,800 of them, and in wartime the L-4 Grasshopper, the olive-drab Cub that spotted artillery across Europe and the Pacific.

The Cherokee years in Florida

Peace brought a brief boom and a hard crash. In 1946 almost 7,800 of the 35,000 civil aircraft built in America were Pipers; a year later output had halved and the board briefly pushed William Piper aside. He was back by 1950, and the company went on to build twins, crop-dusters and, from a new plant at Vero Beach in Florida, the PA-28 Cherokee. First flown on 14 January 1960, it became one of the best-selling light aircraft ever built, with more than 32,000 delivered, and remains in production as the Archer. For decades Piper stood with Cessna and Beechcraft as one of general aviation’s Big Three.

Hurricane Agnes and the moon rig

Then the water came. In June 1972 rain from Hurricane Agnes sent the Susquehanna River over Lock Haven, flooding the plant to a depth of 16 feet. About 100 aircraft were destroyed, along with tooling for the Aztec, Navajo and Comanche, and the damage was put at $23 million. Piper found an odd use for the wrecks: it gave 32 written-off aircraft to NASA, which crashed them deliberately at Langley on a rig first built to simulate Apollo moon landings. The Comanche never came back, and production drifted south to Florida.

Down to $1,000, then owned by Brunei

The family sold out to Bangor Punta in 1969, setting off an eight-year legal fight with Chris-Craft that reached the US Supreme Court. Ownership then passed through Lear Siegler, Forstmann Little and the entrepreneur Stuart Millar while product-liability costs crushed American light-aircraft makers. By July 1991 Piper had 45 employees and about $1,000 in cash when it filed for bankruptcy. It emerged in 1995 as The New Piper Aircraft, dropped the New in 2006, and in 2009 was bought by a Brunei government-funded fund. In 2024 it delivered 291 aircraft, its best year since 2001, helped by the new M700 Fury turboprop.

Factories

• Bradford works · Bradford, Pennsylvania — Home from 1929 until destroyed by fire in March 1937
• Lock Haven plant · Lock Haven, Pennsylvania — Former silk mill; Cub and wartime production; flooded by Hurricane Agnes in 1972
• Ponca City factory · Ponca City, Oklahoma — Opened 1946 for Cub production, closed 1948
• Vero Beach · Vero Beach, Florida — Design centre from the late 1950s, production from 1961; headquarters today
• Lakeland division · Lakeland, Florida — Navajo, Chieftain and Cheyenne production from 1972; sold and closed 1991

People

• William T. Piper · owner and president — Led the company from 1929 until his death in 1970; inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1980
• Clarence G. Taylor · co-founder and designer — Left in 1935 and founded Taylorcraft
• Gordon A. Taylor · co-founder — Killed on 24 April 1928 flying a Taylor Chummy
• Fred Weick · engineer — Led design at Vero Beach; the Pawnee and Cherokee came from his team
• John Calcagno · President and CEO since April 2021

Records and firsts

• J-3 Cub described as the most-produced fabric-covered monoplane of its era, more than 20,000 delivered 1938–1947
• Led the US light-aircraft industry in 1946 with almost 7,800 of 35,000 civil aircraft
• Betty Miller became the first woman to fly solo across the Pacific in 1963, delivering a Piper twin from Oakland to Brisbane
• Garmin Emergency Autoland first certified on the Piper M600 in May 2020