One of my students and I landed his PA-20 at Freeway Apt. in Tucson in a rather high X-wind. After coffee, on our way back to the Pacer, we watched a Cherokee pilot fighting hard to land. Two fellows were watching and one pointed to the Pacer and said "you couldn't fly that today". We climbed in and flew out. I don't think they knew about the lack of rudder in the Cherokee. The Pacer had good rudder control and we had no problems with the X-wind.

I may have been mistaken about the prop on my plane. I had an Aeromatic on a PA-12, but am not sure of the make of the one on the PA-20. It was controllable with a hand knob on the left side of the panel, but had only low and high pitch with no automatic control. The PA-12 prop was automatic, the pitch controlled by RPM working on weights at the hub of the prop.

Mr. Van Tries is right. I had a 1950 Pacer with an Aeromatic 2 speed prop. Mine never gave any trouble until it wore out. The PA-20s apparently weren't build very strong, though. I got caught in bad fog, started to land on a road and while in a turn at about 65 feet agl, ran through several trees. Darn wing came off ! However, while everything else was crushed, the cabin stayed quite intact and my only injuries were a lot of bruises and a scar on the forehead.(Still there 50 years later.) My plane cruised at 120 on 125 h.p., about 7 gph.

This was my favorite plane, I owned one of the last of the 1955 line,N2046A Only one thing wrong, the pacer never had a controlable pitch prop. You might be thinking about the aeromatic 2 speed prop. This is a story best untold. the short story is they did not work. Most of the time i could not get it to shift. In high pitch on a go around this was no fun. PA20 was the best of line up at the time,