Very excited things seem to be working again!
Piper PA-35 Pocono
One of Piper's largely forgotten models, their first attempt to move out from the light aircraft market into the small airliner/commuter field.
Taking the Cherokee 6's concept of a low-cost, high-utility airplane, Piper chose to extend the concept into a much larger commuter aircraft. A very tubby fuselage was built for 2+1 seating with a central aisle, carrying 18 passengers. Although not explicitly discussed, the fuselage would have been very ideally structured to handle extensions fore and aft to increase internal volume.
Piper was known for producing low-cost, but not low-quality, aircraft and a desire to keep the cost as low as possible would be the fatal flaw to the design - as turbine engines were considered too expensive for the Pocono, forcing a reliance on piston engines. The largest available engines were the 8-cylinder IO-720 then also in development. Piper was guaranteed that the engines would be able to deliver 520Hp, but that was never able to be attained, and in reality that was not enough for the Pocono. A windtunnel model was tested with 4 engines, a la Cessna 640, but without larger turbine engines the Pocono was unviable.
The anaemic prototype was sent to Poland, where PZL already producing aircraft for Piper, and the hulk is still in existence there.