Four-Seat Piston Singles Round-Up

For reasons that are both easy to understand and completely counterintuitive, the four-seat, piston-powered airplane has, for decades, dominated the GA marketplace. And it continues to do so, even though the number of pilots who buy these planes as a transportation tool has slowed dramatically, mostly in lock step with the slowing of the overall GA piston market. The tens of thousands of personal planes sold every year in the ’60s and ’70s, the true heyday of flying in the United States, has turned into fewer than a thousand planes in a good year, and the two dozen or more available models have shrunk to just a handful.