heh, I blew past the fact that we're flatlanders and you're mountain
folk. However, the Mooney is still a good suggestion for a club
plane, and a Warrior is an excellent low-wing trainer (though at your
altitude, like you said you may need to get an archer and treat it
like a warrior for loading purposes)

On Aug 28, 10:56*pm, "Robert Barker" wrote:
Thanks to everyone for replying. *Some really good points here. *I kind of
smile at the 152 suggestion... *We have days here in the summer that a 152
can't get off the ground unless it's really light on fuel and the
passgengers are built like twiggy!

"xyzzy" wrote in message

...
On Aug 22, 10:36 pm, "Robert Barker" wrote:

Our club currently flies a 172R and 172SP as trainers and a Diamond DA40
as
our 3rd plane. We've put tons of students thru our 172s and are finally
getting some good usage on our Diamond. We've started "long distance"
planning on our next planes. We'd like to get a good low wing trainer like
an Archer and we'd like to get a high performance plane to get complex
ratings. For the complex plane, we're thinking we like something that can
do 150kts or better that we can do a nice panel upgrade in - say a G540
stack and some other upgrades but still something that the insurance
wouldn't kill us... As we're near the mountains, turbo would be nice but
would incur some other problems with training, etc. That said, we were
leaning towards a Turbo Arrow III... Any suggestions?

Sounds like you need my club's fleet.

4 152 (for primary training)
2 172 SP
2 Warrior
2 Mooney M20J

The Mooney works pretty well in the club environment, no turbo,
simple, low maint landing gear. *Just emphasize speed control on
landings during checkouts. *It does 150 kts and has all you need for
the complex training.