Piper PA-38 Tomahawk

The airframe is aluminium: sheet metal over a riveted frame, the way most aircraft have been built since the 1940s. The design is held under 1 type certificate (A18SO, held by Piper Aircraft INC.). The FAA has issued 21 airworthiness directives (orders that owners must comply with) that name this model, most of them about airframe structure. Operators and repair shops have filed 86 failure reports with the FAA since 1995, 4 of them in the last ten years: about 0.3 a year for every 100 aircraft on the register; the system most often named is engine. 183 approved modifications exist for it, the most by Avidyne Corporation.

Sources: the FAA's type certificate data sheets, airworthiness directives, supplemental type certificates, special conditions and special airworthiness information bulletins (Dynamic Regulatory System), and the FAA's service difficulty reports. A failure report is what an operator or repair station chose to file; the counts show reporting as much as reliability, and larger and commercial fleets report more. How the systems are grouped.