I have a few hundred hours in the later 160hp Warriors (with the Avidyne Entegra cockpit), and I hated those things.
Aside from the stupid ergonomics and horrible ventilation, the Avidyne was a complete nightmare, and the standby instruments were apparently placed to create the most awkward scan possible, especially from the right seat. Especially after using a G1000, I was always impressed at how bad the Avidyne setup in the Warrior was. On quite a few occasions, I'd get a Windows error message upon hitting the avionics master, although it would usually go away if I turned the avionics off and back on again. Once the Entegra had decided it wanted to boot up properly, it frequently decided that the attitude indicator on the PFD didn't actually need to work in flight, and the Entegra was basically impossible to restart in flight, even in perfectly smooth air. Adding to the fun, despite the fact that the MFD tracked fuel flow quite accurately and had been given the correct fuel quantity upon start up, it usually displayed blatantly wrong fuel levels in flight, including several times where it somehow decided that the aircraft had used zero gallons on a two hour flight.
That said, I did appreciate the fact that Piper built the Warrior to survive student pilots. I saw several students (not mine!) absolutely slam Warriors into the runway, and aside from the main gear struts sticking at odd extensions (which they'd randomly do on normal landings as well), I don't recall any of those aircraft being damaged by the abuse. When the flight school changed to 172's, they spent about $300k on repairing firewalls and floorboards that had buckled from the same hard landings that the Warrior would shrug off.
Aside from the stupid ergonomics and horrible ventilation, the Avidyne was a complete nightmare, and the standby instruments were apparently placed to create the most awkward scan possible, especially from the right seat. Especially after using a G1000, I was always impressed at how bad the Avidyne setup in the Warrior was. On quite a few occasions, I'd get a Windows error message upon hitting the avionics master, although it would usually go away if I turned the avionics off and back on again. Once the Entegra had decided it wanted to boot up properly, it frequently decided that the attitude indicator on the PFD didn't actually need to work in flight, and the Entegra was basically impossible to restart in flight, even in perfectly smooth air. Adding to the fun, despite the fact that the MFD tracked fuel flow quite accurately and had been given the correct fuel quantity upon start up, it usually displayed blatantly wrong fuel levels in flight, including several times where it somehow decided that the aircraft had used zero gallons on a two hour flight.
That said, I did appreciate the fact that Piper built the Warrior to survive student pilots. I saw several students (not mine!) absolutely slam Warriors into the runway, and aside from the main gear struts sticking at odd extensions (which they'd randomly do on normal landings as well), I don't recall any of those aircraft being damaged by the abuse. When the flight school changed to 172's, they spent about $300k on repairing firewalls and floorboards that had buckled from the same hard landings that the Warrior would shrug off.
