17,938 Piper PA-28 "Cherokee" family aircraft are currently on the FAA registry — Piper's best-selling single-engine line and, alongside the Cessna 172, one of the two most common trainers in American general aviation. The family spans eighteen model designators built over roughly sixty years: the original PA-28-140 Cherokee (4,264, the largest single variant), the PA-28-180 Cherokee/Archer (3,508), the PA-28-181 Archer II/III (2,920), the PA-28-161 Warrior II (1,496), the retractable-gear PA-28R-200 Arrow (1,223), and turbocharged Dakota/Turbo Arrow variants further down the list.
Why a Cherokee's model letter and suffix matter
The PA-28 line changed engines, gear (fixed vs. retractable), and gross weight across its variants, so two airplanes both called a "Cherokee" can have very different histories and maintenance profiles. Retractable-gear Arrows in particular carry gear-up landing risk that fixed-gear Warriors and Archers don't. Across a six-decade production run, many airframes have passed through flight schools, multiple owners, and in some cases a cancelled-and-reissued N-number (the FAA can reassign a tail after five years under 14 CFR 47.15/47.17) — which means a current-tail-only search can miss an accident that happened under a different registration, or wrongly attribute one that belongs to a different airframe entirely.
What a $79 report adds
Current FAA registration status, prior registrants, recent FAA filings (bills of sale, security agreements/liens), full NTSB accident and incident history, and the serial-number cross-match that catches an accident hiding under a prior tail number.
Check a specific tail number
Use our free tail-number lookup to check registration status and a summary of what a full report would show, or see our used aircraft pre-purchase checklist for what to budget alongside a history check.