Vance Harral

I'm nowhere near local to Tampa, but I've benefited in the past from others loaning me gear rigging tools, and would be glad to pay it forward. If someone else doesn't pipe up here, send me a PM and we can probably work out a deal to ship them back and forth. When's your annual?

It's stiff enough that I can't easily push it in by hand, at least not in the installed location. The other thing is that if you look closely, you'll see the forward arm of the rocker is a little shorter than the aft arm. So the force exerted by the discs and the gear swing arm is mechanically attenuated. i.e. i takes even greater pressure on the forward side of the rocker to close the switch than it would if you pushed it directly. The whole mechanism is bulky and somewhat Rube-Goldberg-ish. I'm not sure why it was designed this way, except to guess that it's "industrial strength" be

Below are photos of the mechanism in the left main. In the annotated photo, the electrical switch is outlined in red. It is a spring-open, push close switch. The spring is quite firm. The switch is actuated by the rocker arm outlined in green. When the disks are compressed on the ground, the forward arm of the rocker is pushed up by the rod outlined in blue, and the aft arm pushed down, such that the aft rocker arm loses contact with the switch. The spring-loaded switch opens, which breaks the circuit that allows the gear to retract. At takeoff, the pucks expand, which moves the

Bummer. Just realized your location, maybe it's an island thing.

I'm a fan of Parker, and of brokers in general. But that said, every time we've added a low-timer to our partnership (4 times over 17 years), Avemco has always been dramatically less expensive than traditional carriers that work with brokers. As I said in another thread, we added a PP-ASEL with no IR and no complex time as a 4th partner on our $58K airplane 6 months ago, and the premium was $2787. Probably more expensive now, but nowhere near $10K. Suggest you give Avemco a call.

If we're going to speculate, I can think of several reasons why four pilots of identical experience flying 50 hours apiece might be riskier than one pilot flying 200 hours. An obvious reason is the potential for miscommunication about the state of the airplane: fuel, squawks, required inspections, etc. Sure, these risks are mitigated by careful pre-flight inspections by each pilot, but we're talking about humans, not robots. All partnerships have at least some minor inefficiencies in communication, and some partnerships are quite sketchy in this respect. Next, since no pilot operat

The main benefit of good fuel gauges in an airplane with an accurate fuel totalizer system is to cover failure modes the totalizer can't "see". The obvious one is failure to program the totalizer correctly. Another is a bad or missing gas cap that allows fuel to be siphoned out of the tank in flight. Another that's applicable to Continental fuel injection is a leak in the fuel return system. It's fair to argue that even the old, original, "inaccurate" senders give you pretty good protection against these sorts of problems. But some people want better accuracy than those old senders ca

Based on anecdotal reports from individual owners with a single pilot on the policy, I think that's about what the market is actually charging. Our partnership premiums have always been substantially more expensive than what sole owners with only one named insured on the policy are paying. My understanding is that when you move beyond 4 pilots, the insurance companies switch from treating you as a "partnership" to treating you as a "flying club", with another substantial jump in premiums.

Right. One thing that's happening in this thread is people mixing quotes for individual policies with one named insured, with partnership policies that name multiple insured pilots. I posted my data point because moontownMooney posted a premium for his four-person partnership that was considerably more expensive than our four-person partnership. KLRDMD says his premium for a twin is close to ours and he's happy with it, but I presume that a personal policy that covers only him.

My data point is 6 months old, which is an eternity given current market behavior. Still, we added a 4th partner at the end of December with *no* instrument rating, *no* complex endorsement, and *no* time in Mooneys (or any other complex aircraft) other than a couple of demo flights. Other three partners have IR, lots of time in type, etc. $58K hull value, pretty close to yours. Total premium was $2787 with Avemco. That was dramatically less expensive than options our long-time broker was able to find with other carriers. We're not quite old enough yet to worry about sticking with a sing

I like the cut of your jib, 1980Mooney. I also don't think I should pay more to subsidize others' risk taking. So... here's a list of risky behaviors many Mooney owners do not engage in: flying at high density altitude flying over mountains flying over water flying at night flying in instrument conditions flying IMC with less than 3 independent attitude indicators flying IMC at all, regardless of equipment flying without an engine monitor flying without ADSB-IN for traffic and weather flying without an angle of attack indicator

We've had the 7000B for about 9 years and have been happy with it. Installed it to replace a KMA-24 just like you're contemplating. I don't long for IntelliAudio, but that feature sure seems to get a lot of press. I've only experienced it on the ground, in a marketing booth at a show, which probably is not the environment where it would really shine. I find that in almost all cases, old-school patience is sufficient to distinguish one audio source from another. But sometimes that requires shutting off one of the sources for a few seconds while waiting for the other to quiet down, and

The point is that loose connections of any type (ground, power or signal), at any location, can cause audio noise. As Yetti says, they "may" (or may not) change with engine RPM. I'll say it again. Check for loose wiring first. It's tedious, but cheap, and absolutely can be the cause of various types of audio noise. It's as good a place to start as any.

On the contrary, this is a completely reasonable guess. Over our years of ownership we've had two "alternator whine" incidents that were not solved by noise filters, or even replacing the alternator. In both cases the culprit turned out to simply be a loose ground wire. Always check the wiring connections first. It's tedious, but cheap, and absolutely can be the cause of various types of audio noise.

Like all retract pilots, I've pondered the gear-up vs. gear-down ditching question from time to time. The problem as I see it is that what many pilots think is an "obvious" positive or negative consequence of gear up vs. gear down is (1) not obvious if you start thinking more critically; and (2) there's no evidence in the actual data to support the "obvious" position. As an example, everyone knows you should leave the gear up if you have to ditch in the water, right? Otherwise the gear will catch, turn you upside down, and drown you? Well, not so fast. Leaving the gear up makes you mo