Steve W

Class E to the surface means legally if you're below VFR there you still need SVFR from whoever controls that airspace, I hear it at the airport here on occasion from the helicopters having to call Seattle.

That sounds fair.. oh, sorry I read that as "You can trade a Mooney for your girlfriend."

So because I love data I went out and got an inexpensive light meter and aimed at at my lights and ended up with more questions than I started with. These were the brightest spot of the beam in each case. 250W Halogen PAR 36: 1400 lux at 11feet: 13737cd(peak) but only drawing 3.5A at 28v... so something was already off here, maybe someone put in a 100W bulb instead. SunSpot 36 01-1030-4596 PAR 36 LED: 4800 lux, er no, 3000, er, no 1800, er no 1600... It stabilized at 1600 and 1.8A(28V) for 18000cd(peak), the taxi light did the same significant drop. After talking with AeroLEDs we came to the consensus that this is probably due to the testing environment with no airflow from the engine or aircraft motion, so I'll be trying to do some testing once I have an engine back. Edit: Yes, one of my right wing lights is 100W, the other is 250W, no good measurements. But it looks like the the LED will come out about twice as bright as the 250W.

My incident was at night, requiring lights, no one even asked me if I had LED lights installed, the insurance guys did come look at the plane but that was to evaluate damage. The FAA didn't look at the plane. Unless the incident was directly caused by the lights, like catching fire, I don't think they'd care at all. I'm doing this, but that's just because of the cost. I'm sure I'll upgrade the other two in a year or so. I just got a cheap light meter and hope to be able to do some measurements this weekend to provide a comparison between the new LEDs and the existing lights.

From the service manual and electrical diagram(in my 1994 at least) the low and high vacuum signals are independent and switch to a high voltage to make the light illuminate. So, find the switch and tie both the lines to ground and it should be happy. Or just cut the switch out and leave them floating as it appears that's what happens when the sensor detects neither high nor low.

One problem is that 'candlepower' and 'candela' are relatively useless terms unless you qualify them. Is that just the brightest point, is that the candlepower over the entire beam width, or is the beam width considered to where the candela falls off to 1/2 the max. This is when proper graphs are needed. If you focus it tightly enough my 2xAA battery flashlight can put out 1 MILLION candlepower and would be useless as a landing light. Similarly lumens are total light output by a light, if it's not focused where you want it then that can also be a useless measure, a 20,000 lumen bulb with no directionality would make a poor landing light as the actual candela would be around 20000/12. Personally I'd love to see one of the remaining aviation publications do a shoot out with measurements and pictures from all the current players.

I'm giving the halogen the benefit of the doubt, I've seen numbers as high as 500, and as you say as low as 240. Yes, all our recognition lights are 14V with a dropping resistor for those with 28V planes...(Sigh)

I don't have a cut down reflector to compare, but here is the original projector bulb. The central spot on the projector bulb is about 11x brighter. But the LED is effective for far more than the tiny hotspot on the projector bulb, camera settings and post-processing were the same. With the normal Whelen reflector I'd expect the central spot brightness to be very close to the $20 off-road LED light(at 6W). I would go out to the plane to compare but I don't want to have to take the covers off so I don't melt them. If anyone wants to fly over my house we can see which one carries farther, but we'd have to wait for summer so the fog clears.

Actually the 25W halogen specs out at about 500 lumens, maybe a little less. Pretty much any modern 5W LED should beat it easily.

I'm considering trying to design, 3d print and metalize a matching reflector to the original with a wedge base inside it so it could be used with LEDs... I looked at a few LED bulbs that have good patterns that could work with mounting a base, looked at a few commercial LED lights(typically sold as off-road pod lights), but they all ended up really large, so I think the general solution will be to move to something custom. Of course I've also been remodeling the bathroom for a year now, and am 3 months in to installing my engine monitor so it's not likely a project that's going to happen soon.

I'm a fan of planned 3 hour legs... Then when I have to dodge weather or whatever I'm still well within my tolerance. That gets me half way to Denver, half way to San Diego, or almost half way across Texas.

I just finished my RC2610 install in place of my TC(per AC whatever), I did it in prep for more glass next year and pulled out the old backup electrical AI with no battery. The biggest hassle was finding someplace to hide the battery, there's way too many wires under the panel and almost every open place under the panel in my plane would be in the way of controls. I ended up making a tray for the right radio stack and ordering the longer cable to route it over there, you may be able to save a bit of money if you order it at the same time, I figured the included 3' would be plenty, 5' may have been overkill, but now I have plenty of service loops... (Anyplace I say 'I' obviously means I, while supervised by and inspected by my A&P) But at the same time, maybe I should have gone with a G5... then it could have been a backup if I decided I could afford a GFC 500 Txi or it could have been a primary G5 later and something else as a backup.

Only if you spring for the 930... those of us with the 900 only get a single LED. But, the 900 is also small enough to fit in my left panel, so it's not like I'll have to look far for those numbers.

Pull the entire panel forward, unscrew the front of the 3 breakers in the COM row, push them and their associated bus-bar back far enough to slide a new breaker in at NAV 2, attach to bus bar, attach wire for new outlet, reattach front nuts to all 4 breakers, route wires(with service loops) re-attach panel. Probably only a couple minutes longer than attaching another wire to the Audio panel breaker. Remember to drop the associated screws at least 20 times. 'Easy'... Why yes, I did just do this for my JPI, except I re-used an old Fuel-Flow breaker slot and the already routed wire instead.

The good news is with people pulling them out we should have a ready source of mostly working parts until upgrade time. My avionics shop said to just call them and they'd happily send me a removed from service gyro for cheap.

Yea, I found that tidbit out(normally closed relay) when I was testing some work I'm doing on ground power, on my M20J that relay is on the Aux bus, so when I had the breaker pulled, turned on the master and my Stormscope came on... Anyway, best place will be to make it like the factory, add a new breaker to the CB panel and pick up power there, may even have one already on an Avionics bus bar you can use. On my M20J you can pull the CB panel a few inches forward without disconnecting any wires(I did have to take the MP gauge out, the hose wasn't long enough), enough to get to the breakers and swap one out, the factory wiring should be fine, any aftermarket stuff may not have left enough service loops though. Other option is to unscrew the front of every breaker and any instruments in that panel and just pull the face off, but that sucks and still may not give enough access.

There was a mistrial declared, but they're starting the procedure to do it all over again.

I hung a cut-down funnel(or a small funnel to begin with) on the filter with safety wire with a tube running out the cowl flap on it into the same bucket as the quick drain, poked a hole in one side of the filter, turned it 90 degrees so the hole was down, poked a hole in the top and then went away for a while while the filter and engine drained.Then still wrapped it in rags when I removed it.

I'm still hopeful that the rumored, eventual app for getting and closing clearances at any airport eventually exists. https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2017/november/30/app-could-deliver-ifr-clearances-to-mobile-devices

I've thought a bit about this, there's one chip that has a 40 km range but no bearing capabilities, but really, with modern tech we should be able to build something that fits into the size of a current antenna and provides all the same data. All it would take is money and probably lots of it. Possibly another interesting idea might just be to get the latency reduced. If there were a way to get ground based data to aircraft with under a minute delay and handled both cloud to ground and intra-cloud this would probably cover 95% of the current in-cockpit users. Also, just needs money, and probably lots of it.

I just noticed that Aircraft Spruce has now mentioned LoPresti is doing a LED lights now(LOPRESTI ILLUMIVATION LAZR PAR 36 LED WITH STC FOR GA AIRCRAFT and a $1000 PAR46 as well). No specs listed just '60% Brighter', nothing useful on their website yet either. Looks like it will cover anything that currently has an STC, so Mooney will be included.

It's safe, but it's like one of those people who insist on posting a screenshot instead of just typing stuff into the box.

Yes, it looks like there is a private receiver somewhere picking you up when you're high but nothing near your home airport so down low you're at the mercy of the FAA. Not sure if you can see it on the free account, but if you view a flight and click "View Track Log" you can see the source for each data point.

I had to renew after my incident this spring, about $60-70k in work on a $130k hull. Went up from $2500 to $2700 with USAIG.

Call the local fire extinguisher people, most cities have them, they should be able to point you to someone who can service it if they can't. Then compare the quote to a replacement.