Flight Testing and Evaluation
For another eight years, Piper and Lindsay lobbied Congress to force the USAF to officially re-evaluate the Enforcer. Eventually in the 1979 defense bill $11.9 million was allocated for Piper to build two new prototypes and for the USAF to perform another flight evaluation. Since the Enforcer was never in the Air Force inventory, it was not given an official military designation and did not receive an air force serial number. Instead, it carried the Piper designation PA-48 and FAA registration numbers, N481PE and N482PE.
By the time the PA-48s were completed, they shared less than 10 percent of their structure with the P-51, and were longer and larger. Essentially, the PA-48 Enforcer was a completely new aircraft.
The two PA-48s were tested during 1983 and 1984 at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida and Edwards Air Force Base, California. As in the Pave COIN tests of 1971, the PA-48s were found to perform well in their intended role, but the USAF again decided not to purchase the aircraft.
Read more about this topic: Piper PA-48 Enforcer
Famous quotes containing the words flight, testing and/or evaluation:
“It is marvelous indeed to watch on television the rings of Saturn close; and to speculate on what we may yet find at galaxy’s edge. But in the process, we have lost the human element; not to mention the high hope of those quaint days when flight would create “one world.” Instead of one world, we have “star wars,” and a future in which dumb dented human toys will drift mindlessly about the cosmos long after our small planet’s dead.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“Today so much rebellion is aimless and demoralizing precisely because children have no values to challenge. Teenage rebellion is a testing process in which young people try out various values in order to make them their own. But during those years of trial, error, embarrassment, a child needs family standards to fall back on, reliable habits of thought and feeling that provide security and protection.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)
“Evaluation is creation: hear it, you creators! Evaluating is itself the most valuable treasure of all that we value. It is only through evaluation that value exists: and without evaluation the nut of existence would be hollow. Hear it, you creators!”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)