Vance Harral

We didn't have any fitment problems with the new pump that I'm aware of, though I didn't watch while the mechanic installed it. There was plenty of cussing given the tight space where the pump goes, but nothing mentioned about bolt holes not lining up or anything similar.

Lots of reasonable and helpful opinions in the thread, but I don't seen any actual numbers on the risk of dissipating additional energy on rollout. In theory, one touches down right at stall speed. The OP doesn't say which model of Mooney he's flying (unless I missed it), but in my F model, stall speed is 68 MIAS with zero flaps and 62 with full flaps. That's a 9.7% increase in speed. Energy goes as velocity squared, so that's 20% more energy to dissipate at touchdown with zero vs. full flaps. The numbers are similar if you touch down a few MPH above stall speed. This 20% increase in energy to be dissipated is irrelevant with a perfect landing on an adequate runway; and one can choose to always land on runways of adequate length. But you can't choose to never make a mistake or have a problem, e.g. a slight bounce on landing, less than perfect alignment in a crosswind, flat tire, and so on. Pilots who consistently choose no flap landings in pursuit of "smoothness" or whatever other goal they have in mind, are choosing to accept the risk of about 20% more energy to dissipate in the event of a problem on landing. Up to each individual pilot to decide how they feel about that risk.

I don't know exactly when or why the FAA started leaning on DPEs about AD compliance, and it doesn't really matter. The facts are simply that at present, AD compliance for the airplane in which a practical test is conducted, is a checkbox item for DPEs prior to beginning a practical test The FAA wants a specific record that the DPE checked this, probably as a result of some past, high-profile incident. In my experience as both a candidate and a recommending instructor, AD compliance verification is conducted at the same level of interest and scrutiny as for other aircraft paperwork: AROW documents, required inspections, etc. For example, in essentially all cases, a DPE will demand to to actually lay eyes on the official airworthiness certificate for the airplane. But they are very unlikely to look at it with a microscope, question the signature on it, complain that it's improperly laminated, etc. They could, of course, but in practice they just don't investigate beyond reason. Similarly, they now want to see some evidence that the aircraft operator is paying attention to and logging AD compliance. But as others noted above, most DPEs are not mechanics. And even the ones who are, aren't going to perform their own personal AD compliance investigation during a practical test. They just want to see something reasonable so they can check the box and stave off later inquiries from their FAA POI. I whined to one of the DPEs I work with - who actually does happen to be an A&P/IA - that an annual inspection itself is a record of AD compliance. He said yes, but pointed out that some ADs are recurring, on schedules that don't necessarily line up with other inspections. This is an important point that I don't think has been yet discussed in this thread. For example, if the OP's Mooney is subject to the Hartzell prop hub AD requiring repetitive eddy current inspections, it's entirely possible the aircraft has run over the 100 hour limit since the last annual, such that an "all ADs complied with as of this date" on the last annual signoff isn't satisfactory, even casually. So... what this particular DPE I work with wants to see is (1) a cumulative record of one-time AD compliance, which might be as simple as an "all ADs complied with as of this date" statement on the last annual sign-off; and (2) some sort of documentation in the logs that convinces him recurring ADs are being tracked. It's easiest if he finds a tabular sheet for recurring ADs, with a bunch of entries showing each time the associated inspection/action was performed and when it's next due. There are other reasonable ways to track recurring ADs. But over time, a lot of flight schools have moved to the one-tabular-sheet-per-recurring AD format to make everyone's life easy, and a lot of DPEs have come to somewhat expect this. It's theoretically possible to take a check ride in an airplane with no recurring ADs. But that would be unusual, and a DPE is right to be skeptical if you argue the last annual signoff is good enough. Cessnas have the seat rail AD, Pipers have the wing spar inspection, etc. In summary, put the same level of effort into showing AD compliance for a DPE that you'd put into showing compliance with the annual inspection, ELT inspection, and so forth; and make sure you have a good story about recurring ADs. Be professional, but no need to agonize over it beyond reason.

At the risk of beating a dead horse... isn't it nuts that when you asked this question, the definitive reference is just a post on Mooneyspace, made by a person who doesn't even work for Mooney or Lasar or Dugosh? No press release on mooney.com or lasar.com or dugosh.com. No article in AOPA, AVweb, AVbrief, Flying, General Aviation News. Traditional and AI searches on "Mooney factory service center" return only ancient references, except for that Mooneyspace thread. When Paul says, "communications have never been a priority", he ain't kidding.

The "factory" was those buildings in Kerrville, the tooling and parts they contained, and the people who reported to work in them. The buildings and some of the tooling are no longer controlled by Mooney. That's significant, end-of-an-era news, which was not accompanied by a press release. It's not necessarily fatal news. As you note, there is now a maintenance shop at KERV with "Mooney" on the nameplate, and likely experienced technicians on the shop floor. And as of last year there is a specific operation you can call to inquire about parts (which doesn't have "Mooney" on their nameplate, but whatever). But the status of the people and tooling and parts that used to be in the Kerrville factory buildings is nebulous, because the principals can't/won't communicate with the customer base in a transparent and timely manner. Again, we're not entitled to transparency, Mooney is a privately held company. Not saying I could do any better if I were at the helm. But there is a cost in goodwill and long-term economic viability associated with secrecy and confusion, which you seem to acknowledge. From my viewpoint in the peanut gallery, the principals are either underestimating that cost, or they're painted so far into a corner that all that's left is a Hail Mary deal that requires absolute secrecy. Neither of those scenarios is encouraging for the future of Mooney support, and in the absence of communication from the principals, speculation about them is predictable and reasonable.

Well, enlighten me, maybe I missed something. Maybe something to be excited about. Who is the "new" owner of Mooney? Is it a Brett Stokes led investor group? New Chinese investment money? Something else? To be clear, by "owner", I mean the actual holder(s) of the equity, debt and type certificates; not the person who holds the"President of Mooney" title. In particular, I'm asking who is the group of people that either couldn't or didn't want to continue the lease on the Kerrville facility. Note that I'm in no position to criticize that decision, I just want to know who made it. And no, I'm not necessarily entitled to that knowledge. But it's an entirely reasonable question. This is exactly the kind of vague handwaving that is driving so many of us nuts. What do you mean that Lasar "essentially" owns Mooney's part business? If Brett Stokes and Co actually own some or all of Mooney's equity and debt, just say so, explicitly. If not, then Lasar doesn't own anything at all. They just have an arrangement with the actual owners for exclusive distributor rights and elevated order authority. Probably a very well-intentioned one. But the nature and goodness of that exclusive distributor agreement is a separate discussion that is independent of ownership, and ownership matters a lot. Every communication I can find about the Lasar/Mooney deal tap dances around this. Best as I can tell, the question of Mooney ownership (and leadership) has reeked of cigar smoke, misdirection, and stonewalling for years now. Every avenue I've tried to research this - including here on Mooneyspace - is a dead end. No major aviation news outlet — AOPA, AVweb, Flying, General Aviation News, or Aviation Week — has reported a formal change of ownership at Mooney International since the Pollack/US Financial group took over in September 2020. There has been no announced sale, acquisition, or new investor as of today. Lasar's "What's going on with Mooney and Lasar" post is five months old, and entirely predates this news of the actual Mooney factory sliding out from under the control of whatever ownership group held the lease. Paul, I recognize and respect that you're a particularly special member of the Mooney community. I value your contributions, and I don't mind the cheerleading - I've been team Mooney for decades. But the repeated, "Be patient, good news is coming..." didactics from you and other insiders, has worn thin to the point of being disingenuous. I'm sure the rampant speculation from peanut gallery - myself included - is frustrating. But if you want it to stop, then some grownups need to show up and make real and meaningful public announcements instead of platitudes. If the insiders can't or won't do this, then speculation - including negative speculation - is entirely warranted.

I think that's a complex question. Some Mooney parts were never made at Mooney's Kerrville facility. They were just ordered from 3rd party vendors, e.g. landing gear actuators. Availability of these parts has been problematic for some time now, but that has little to do with the Kerrville facility itself. In theory, they could be ordered from any office, anywhere in the world. Lots of Mooney parts that were made at the Kerrville facility don't really require that facility. e.g. wing skins, gear doors, etc. don't require any particularly special tooling. Tools at the Kerrville factory may have facilitated making the parts more quickly and/or in larger numbers, but that kind of manufacturing efficiency hasn't really been an honest concern for a long time now. That leaves a subset of parts that really require Kerrville-facility tooling to manufacture. Best case, that's jigs that could be easily removed from and shipped elsewhere, but some of that stuff might have been "confiscated" to settle debt. Worst case, it's large machines that are impractical to move. One famous story about the Mooney factory involves a massive stamping press that was so large they actually built the building (the "Hammer House") around the machine, rather than moving the machine into the building. I don't know to what extent various Mooney parts rely on this sort of specialty tooling, but producing them is obviously a challenge if the factory itself is no longer available.

That the Mooney factory in Kerrville will never again produce Mooney airplanes or (only) Mooney parts is not news, that's been evident for a while. That all parts orders go through LASAR is now established as well. But out of morbid curiosity, I'm trying to understand what this open market offer on the lease of the Kerrville premises - apparently including a bunch of equipment inside the hangars - means from a legal/technical/practical perspective. Is it definitively established that no employee of Mooney (or LASAR) has access to the Kerrville premises any more? Is there still Mooney parts stock on the shelves in those hangars in addition to the manufacturing equipment? If so, is it being shipped to LASAR's facility in Oregon, or will it be handed over the new lessee? On a related note, despite several recent threads on Mooney/LASAR ownership and management, it's still not clear to me whether "Mooney International" actually has any staff employees left (regardless of whether they're drawing a paycheck or working for free). For example, people still seem to be able to get a hold of Kevin Hawley, and I'm grateful for his help to the community. But it's unclear to me who Kevin and others still carrying the freight ultimately take direction from, if anyone. Brett Stokes is now listed as the "President" of Mooney at https://mooney.com/about/#team, but as far as I know, Mooney International is still financially owned primarily by the the Chinese Meijing Group and a Jonny Pollack led investor group. Maybe it's all academic if no one is getting paid, but I'm curious. I guess I'm just trying to understand at what point it becomes accurate to say, "Mooney used to be a Kerrville-based company, but what's left of it now resides in Oregon".

Fair skies and tailwinds to Jose. Though I only knew him through his posts here, he was clearly one of a kind.

+1 on what @N201MKTurbo said. If your early model J is anything like my late-model F, the mechanism has nothing to do the ram air door itself. There is a microswitch mounted just behind the panel where the ram air cable feeds through, that closes when a nub on the cable actuates it. The switch itself is mounted on slotted holes, such that it can slide for adjustment. Sounds like either your switch has stopped working, or (more likely) has slipped.

We replaced literally all of our red/green/yellow/blue tubing a few years back. Not difficult, just tedious. In some cases you can use the old tubing to fish the new tubing into place. If still have a bunch of those spring hose clamps and intend to keep them (or replace with same), get yourself a dedicated pair of hose clamp pliers. The right tool makes all the difference in reducing frustration.

This is true, but oversimplified. The liability insurance contract you sign with Avemco or any other insurer does not allow them to respond to a liability claim by simply writing a check for the policy limit and walking away. Liability policies include a "duty to defend" you in legal proceedings, see https://lexisnexis.com/supp/largelaw/no-index/business/insurance-duty-to-defend-and-duty-to-indemnify-checklist.pdf. So the real-world calculus of liability limits is not what costs a plaintiff might incur and sue for, but rather what a plaintiff's lawyers could actually obtain in a settlement or judgement, when pitted against the staff attorneys or 3rd party council engaged by your insurer. And that is influenced by how much insurance the plaintiff themselves carries, the net worth of both parties, and numerous other intangibles. Understanding this really changed the way I think about liability insurance. When I have asked Avemco why they don't offer higher liability limits like their competitors, the consistent story I get is, "If you - a run of the mill light aircraft owner with an uninteresting net worth - are sued for more than the limits of your policy, we're going to crush the litigants in court proceedings. We don't hide our lower liability limits, we advertise them. We have an excellent litigation reputation, and everyone knows they're not going to get more than the $100K sublimit - we've never had a judgement against our client for more than that. So plaintiffs can best serve their clients by taking the $100K we offer in a settlement, and looking elsewhere for the balance - starting with the damaged party's own insurance, and from there perhaps to the airport, the aircraft manufacturer, the city government, whatever." Is Avemco lying? Probably not outright. Are they spinning a tale that's favorable to their business model? Most certainly, and if you don't buy it, you're free to select an insurer that provides higher limits. I'm not qualified to say how good their attorneys are, each prospective customer can guess for themselves. But I'll emphasize again that liability limit calculus is based on what a plaintiff can actually obtain in court against the defense your insurer is required to mount, not on the raw cost of damaged machines or bodies. If the latter were the controlling factor, then even 100 million wouldn't be enough, because you might just be unlucky enough to ball up your Mooney into Tyler Perry's Gulfstream III during a landing accident. In the real world, the preponderance of attorneys, judges, and juries would expect Tyler to carry his own insurance and/or make another Madea movie to cover his losses. He might put the $100K from Avemco toward his deductible on the Gulfstream, or maybe just fund another giant scale R/C airliner. Bottom line: a $1M/$100K sublimit liability policy is plenty of insurance for many aircraft owners, and shouldn't be pooh-pooh'd just because it's relatively easy for an individual damaged person to run up a $100K medical and/or repair bill.

The airframe is easy. Airworthiness directives for the M20J available at faa.gov as @Justin Schmidt indicated. Service bulletins/instructions available at mooney.com: click "Service and Support" scroll to the pull-down menu for model, and select M20J. The challenge is that the airframe is not the whole airplane. You and/or your IA have to perform similar searches by manufacturer for your engine and propeller, of which multiple variants are approved for the M20J including aftermarket STCs. More importantly, you must perform similar searches for all "accessories" attached to your airframe and engine, including various batteries, starters, prop governors, magnetos, oil coolers, and of course avionics. Again including all aftermarket/STC'd equipment installed in the decades since your airplane was built. I'm not sure why anyone thinks there is some golden source of information that makes this work easy. It might be relatively easy for a few lucky souls who can afford an airplane built in the last decade, which is still equipped only with OEM parts. But for most of us, it's an effort-laden slog between ourselves and our mechanics, to detail all the individual components to which an AD or SB might apply. It's particularly gruesome for an IA with a new customer and a new-to-them airplane. Note that services like adlog don't really solve this problem - those services rely on you to tell them what accessories are installed on your airplane. Maybe there will be a time in the future when some sort of magic scanning app can identify everything on your airplane from a few pictures. But today, there is no app or single information source which distills this down to a straightforward "look in this one place and get everything" exercise. You have to crawl all over the specific airplane to get part and serial numbers, make a list of every component that's not part of the airframe, and research each one.

That's not exactly correct, but it gets a little complicated. The G5 absolutely has a built-in GPS, but its purpose is only to provide positional data over time to allow the instrument to correct for gyro drift. It is not designed to provide nav information or data for a moving map. In particular, I'm not aware of any way to configure a G5 to output its GPS data to another device via its CANBUS or RS-232 outputs. The G5 installation manual allows you to provide GPS data to the G5 for drift connection from another device instead of using the built-in GPS receiver, e.g. you can wire an RS-232 output from a GTN 650 to the G5 and leave the internal GPS disabled. A lot of installations are set up this way because it's less expensive to run the RS-232 connection than it is to purchase and install the additional GPS antenna that is otherwise required. It's been a while since I looked at the installation manual, but my recollection is that if you're super paranoid, you can connect both the RS-232 setup and also an external GPS antenna, and set up the G5 to fail over from one to the other source. Again, though, this stuff only has to do with gyro drift correction, nothing to do with navigation. It's also my recollection that loss of GPS data won't cause your G5 to kill you with totally invalid attitude information if GPS signal is lost. It's still good enough to keep the greasy side down, it just doesn't quite meet certification accuracy requirements without GPS correction.

I think the ubiquitousness, relative low expense, and pretty good reliability of EFB tablets has rendered a second, full-featured NAV/COM/GPS to be largely uninteresting relative to what one might otherwise spend money on. Nowhere is this reflected more than in the flight school airplanes I fly, none of which are equipped with a second GPS, and a couple of which don't even have a second ground-based NAV radio, just like you note. My main gripe about this has nothing to do with safety, only with training. Teaching VOR navigation is challenging enough when manipulating the hardware consists only of "tune this frequency, turn that CDI knob". Increasingly, it's "click the cursor button to select the nav tuner, tune the nav frequency, enter a series of clicks/rotations on the HSI to select NAV indication, then more clicks/rotations to select a course". I try to be good natured about it, and preach the value of the redundancy of ground-based nav. But it's increasingly clear to me that the students simply don't want to do it, and just hope GPS is always going to be there, on their iPad if not on their panel-mounted equipment. And I think the reason it's increasingly hard to beat this attitude actually has less to do with the theory of VOR navigation, and more to do with how much of a PITA it is to set up the instrumentation to actually show VOR/LOC course guidance.