REVIEW - Alabeo’s Saratoga II TC for FSX/P3D

Review

A review by Ray Marshall

When I first heard the Alabeo PA-32R Saratoga II TC would be the first Carenado/Alabeo aircraft to feature the new Flight1 GTN750 as a VC panel integration option I was excited.  But, as I immediately called up the Alabeo Facebook page to view the latest sneak preview screenshots I was truly excited.  When I finally got to a website with the proper performance numbers for this latest incarnation of the Cherokee Six of old, I was ecstatic.

It is quite uncommon for me to get this excited over a mediocre performance single engine, low wing aircraft, especially one from the Piper shop.  Now just hold on a minute, that is not a knock at Piper or the Saratoga, it’s just a hard earned fact that I grew up in the Cessna and Mooney camp.  It will become obvious as you read more that I now have the highest regard for this newest complex and high performance airplane for FSX and P3D.  The Saratoga has had many splendid improvements since the old Cherokee Six days and now looks, acts, flies and performs as a very different airplane than I remember from the golden days.

You see, about 45 years ago, when I was a young spout growing up in Florida and chasing another rating for my Commercial/Instrument pilot’s license. I was eager to make at least one entry each day in my newly acquired Professional Flight Log Book.  This is the one that is about an inch thick that you buy so folks will think you really are a commercial pilot.  Not that little black one that you got when you were working on your Private Pilot’s license that fits in your back pocket. 

Anyway, I ran a part-time charter service and would fly anyplace anyone would like to go as long as I was back home the next day.  You see, my day job was at Kennedy Space Center just across the Indian River from TICO airport, but my daily interest was about as far from landing the first American on the moon as possible.

Fortunately for me, my Supervisor at the Space Center was also a moonlighting A&P Mechanic that took care of our fleet of 3 small Cessnas.  I had learned to fly in a Cessna 150 that I rented from a local flying club, then I bought a two-year old C-150 from Burnside-Ott, the big flight school training all those Iranians down at Opa Locka, just North of Miami. 

Actually we bought all 3 of our airplanes that day; our mechanic picked out a blue one, I chose a green one, and my flight instructor grabbed a red one.  In a day or so, we all had business cards and an overnight Delaware Corporation was formed and we were in business - a moonlighting or shade tree charter, flight instruction, and airplane rental business, that is.  No physical office or building, just ramp space.

The economy was humming along, we were making good money at the Space Center, and we could work the 12 hour night shift and not only have all day to fly, we got a bonus for working nights.  It doesn’t get much better than that.  The company I worked for actually flew our weekly paychecks down to Florida in a Gulfstream.  Sure it was a G-1, but this was 1968 and they only had a few models back then and they all had propellers.

Is this going someplace?

Yep.  Our most common overnight charter was to the Bahamas Islands.  This was a piece of cake provided you could find a fairly fast airplane to rent that had 4 or 6 seats.  Our paying customers were almost always fellow workers from across the river with a wife or girlfriend.  Our first choice was to use one of Roy LoPresti’s Mooneys that was based just down the ramp from our 3 Cessnas.  If they were all scheduled, flying, or not enough seats, we went looking for an almost new Cessna 210 with a fall back to an old beat-up Cessna 205.  If the Cessnas weren’t available we could rent a new Cherokee Six at Daytona but we couldn’t make much profit on the charter.  A new Cherokee Six rented for a whopping $30/hour back then.

So the PA-32 was our third and usually last choice, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t popular.  It seemed to always be available for an overnighter and it would haul as many folks with their overnight bags as we ever had at any one time.  The math was quite simple.  Just carry enough fuel to get there and back without much thought of Alternates or reserve flying time.  The East Coast of Florida has an airport just about every 10 miles from Jacksonville to Miami so we had plenty of ‘Alternates’. We had a choice of Fort Lauderdale or West Palm Beach for clearing customs and this was in the days when the drug smugglers were all in Miami so if we just smiled, looked professional, and said nothing we usually were through customs in a matter of minutes.

The flight across the Atlantic Ocean from West Palm to Grand Bahamas Island is literally just a hop-skip-and-jump - maybe 60 miles. I don’t think you are ever out of sight of land more than a few minutes and by the time you have explained that ‘we know how to avoid the Bermuda Triangle’ you were approaching the white sandy beaches of another Country.  You instantly knew that you were no longer in Kansas, or Florida, when the 7 foot tall blue-black man greeted you with a big smile and ‘Hi Mon, welcome to Grand Bahamas’.

The key to avoiding a serious delay in landing at Freeport, FPO was to never tell Approach Control or the Tower that you were a Cherokee.  You were always a Piper, never a Cherokee.  Back then it was not uncommon for three DC-8s to be in the pattern shooting touch and goes and having all kinds of simulated failures. Several airlines used this particular airport for training.

Our goal was to locate the heavies and merge in with them without reporting our position.  Then all of a sudden appear at the proper altitude and spacing at the Outer Marker and in our best deep voice declare “Piper blah blah, outer marker inbound, landing.’ If we pulled it off, we saved about 30 minutes of costly flight time making 360s and watching the DC-8 guys learn how to land on a 10,000 foot runway.  A DC-8 climbing out into clear blue sky was easy to spot. You just look for the 4 black trails of smoke

For this scenario the Cherokee Six was perfect. One is was bigger, it really was bigger and it wasn’t a Cessna or Mooney which for some reason were all small planes in the bigger scheme of things.  Should we get the request for ‘Say Type’ the answer was always Papa Alpha Three Two Three Hundred.  That was a perfectly correct answer and by the time you got it all out you were on short final.  The PA-32-300 that we rented from Daytona Beach Aviation was a seven-seater and it was big.  I mean it was wider than the competition, had a cabin that looked like a bus, had its own baggage door and you could even put baggage in the Forward Baggage hold.  Wow.  Now if the gear would retract it would really be something special.

We also flew the Cherokee Arrow a lot. This was a couple of years before the Arrow II was introduced.  The advantage was the Arrow was new, smelled new and had retractable landing gear.  The 200 hp version was very nice but didn’t have the cabin room that the later models had.  Now what we need to do is put the retractable gear from the Arrow on the Cherokee Six.  Someone at Piper must have been listening because that is was the basis for the PA-32R Cherokee Lance. (It was actually a much beefier gear retraction system)

For a few years the Lance had the stabilator moved up to become an impressive T –tail design and a turbocharger was added to create the Lance II. This looked cool but didn’t handle quite right in the flare and at liftoff and climb-out so the 1980 models reverted to the standard tail design.  One key feature that originated with the Lance II was the large oval air intake directly below the propeller hub. This was the PA-32RT-300T

With not much else for changes, the designation became the -301 but more importantly the name Saratoga was introduced. In 1980 the Saratoga SP replaced the Lance with the Stabilator back at the conventional location.  The Lance II (turbo) became the Turbo Saratoga SP with the standard tail arrangement. This was now the PA-32R-T301.

In 1993 the airplane received a major makeover in looks and comfort and some useful system and equipment updates and was designated the Saratoga II HP.  This upgrade is well documented later in the review.

Starting with the 1998 model year, the Saratoga II TC was unveiled with a hot new turbocharged and fuel injected Lycoming TIO-540-AH1A engine.  The details between the introduction of the Saratoga II HP in mid-1993 and the startup in 1997 with the turbocharger are few and far between but it appears the turbo is the difference in the two editions.

For the first two years, the ‘toga’ TC featured the King Avionics suite but was switched to dual Garmin GNS430s and a GTX-320 transponder for the 1999 year model.  In mid-Year 2000 the avionics were again upgraded with newer Garmin gear.  Beginning in 2004 the Avidyne Entegra ‘Glass Panel’ was offered as optional equipment and in 2007 the Garmin G1000 was the one to have.  A couple of years after that Piper quit building the Saratoga II TC.

The Saratoga II TC was an important airplane in The New Piper's product mix. A step-up program let Warrior and Archer owners trade up to a Saratoga at a pre-agreed price, and Saratoga owners could do the same if they decide to move up to a Matrix, Mirage or Meridian or Seneca V.

The Saratoga bridged the gap between New Piper's piston and pressurized models and, as always, serves as an uncomplaining, stylish hauler for both the owner-flown and charter markets.

Updating the Saratoga SP

For 1998 the HP and TC got additional interior tweaking in the form of additional cubby holes for storing flight manuals and charts and — most noticeably — the removal of the aft-facing seat behind the copilot. Instead of six seats, the 1998 airplanes come standard with five seats and an executive console. The woodgrain console, which debuted on the Seneca V, includes a sliding desktop, drink holders and cooler, storage drawers and trays, and power outlets for a notebook computer.

Piper introduced new technology to the panel by installing the sophisticated engine instrumentation from Flight Line, Incorporated. The six round analog gauges include manifold pressure, tachometer, turbine inlet temperature/fuel flow, oil temperature/pressure, vacuum pressure/cylinder head temperature, and left and right fuel quantities. A panel at the top of the stack depicts any of the parameters in a digital format. The pilot selects the outputs to be displayed digitally by turning a knob. The system also digitally displays information on the electrical system, outside air temperature, and fuel to destination or next waypoint.

The most useful feature is the ability to display percent of power being used, based on the system's measurement of manifold pressure, rpm, OAT, pressure altitude, and fuel flow. The result is displayed in 5-percent increments. The pilot can also select a desired percent of power and propeller revolutions per minute and the system will display the required manifold pressure.

How about this specific Alabeo model?

We know that it is based on a real world 2003 Piper Saratoga II TC based in Chile and that if we need to know more than what we find in the Carenado documentation folder for this aircraft, we will be searching for a manual or handbook for a PA-32R-301T. 

Watch the location of the alpha characters and digits as they are important for proper identification.  All aircraft in the Cherokee Six family belongs to the PA (Piper Aircraft) – 32 (not 28 or 34), R is for Retractable Gear (and lots of PA-32 aircraft do not have retractable landing gear). The 301 is to differentiate between the other 7,000 or so PA-32 aircraft that don’t have the tapered wings and the ending T is for the Turbocharger.  If the designation does not end with a T then is could possibly be a 20 year old Lance II model.  Position of that letter is important.

So we are flying a Model year 2003 Piper Saratoga II TC that also uses the designation PA-32R-301T.

A few years earlier the panel had dual Garmin GNS430 units and the STEC 55x autopilot in the center stack.  Around mid-year 2000 the big new GNS530 was on top with a GNS430 on the bottom.  A few years later and the first Avidyne 500 units were available as an optional upgrade.  Another couple of years and the Avidyne was standard and the Garmin G1000 was the optional upgrade.

AFAIK the only difference in the Saratoga II TC and the HP model is the turbocharger and maybe a scoop or intake vent on the side of the HP cowling.  This ‘only’ difference adds about 5,000 feet to the ceiling and a few knots to the airspeed but a lot more oomph on takeoff and climb-outs. Fortunately Alabeo chose to build us the TC model.