Vance Harral

Aluminum cowls are also considerably less prone to cracking than fiberglass ones. But they're not immune from cracking, and again, that more unwieldy cowl on the J model is also better for speed, cooling, and ramp appeal. Everything's a tradeoff.

IPC MAN-203 for the 65-67 models shows the brace, whereas MAN-205 for the 68-76 models does not. So looks like they were deleted with the 1968 model year, though serial number is a better reference than "model year". Many folks aren't aware of the evolution of the cowling in the C/D/E/F models across the years. The stringers of the lower cowl in our airplane actually still have the mounting holes for the side braces, and I had one mechanic ask me where the "missing" side braces were, until I showed him the IPC applicable to our airframe.

Attached are 3 photos of what our airplane looks like with the two "cheek" side panels and the top cowling removed. The cheek panels are removed first and re-installed last. They're held on with 14, quarter-turn fasteners, that take about 60 seconds per side to fasten/un-fasten. The panels themselves are about 2' x 3' and weigh just a few pounds, it's a trivial, 1-man job to R&R them. The top cowl is removed after the cheek panels are off, and reinstalled before the cheek panels are put back in place. It's held in place by 5, quarter-turn fasteners; and 8, 10-32 machine screws. It takes about 60 seconds to remove assuming you have an electric screwdriver. It takes slightly longer to re-install, but only because it takes a few seconds to get it aligned on all four corners before fastening the screws. As I said, we essentially never remove the lower cowl. It's certainly not necessary to do so for an oil change. All in all, it's a really nice design for maintenance, second only to hinged cowls like on certain Cherokee and Bonanza models. The tradeoff vs. the M20J cowl is that it costs you about 7 knots, and a certain amount of ramp appeal.

We've never had the entire exhaust out, I can see how that would require removing the lower cowl. Some of those other things can be done without removing the lower cowl, but if you've already gotten good at doing so, they're probably easier without it in place.

Out of curiosity, what for?

Correct, but there is almost never a reason to remove the lower cowl. You don't need to do so for any kind of required inspection, and you certainly don't need to in order to work on the landing light, replace the air filter, replace alternator brushes, work on fuel and oil lines, etc. We've only removed the lower cowl once in 20+ years, and that was because in the process of replacing the infamous air intake boot, we realized it was "most of the way off", and thought we may as well take it off and give it a really good scrub-down.

The fancier the high-end stuff you install, the more spare room there is for that old-school bling. This is not a Mooney, but you get the idea. This particular owner lacks not for cash, and installed dual G500TXi 7" displays, GTN 750 with remote audio panel and transponder, GI-275 for backup attitude... but that's a "cheap" #2 NAV/COM driving a mechanical CDI in an otherwise $75K-ish panel.

With regard to speed mods increasing maintenance complexity, the sloped windshield and resultant avionics access difficulty rightfully gets most of the attention. But that's not all there is to it. The stock cowl for the F with no mods, closures, or other "improvements" can be removed in about 2 minutes. You can see the alternator and its belt, and the starter and its pop-out bendix gear during preflight. You can inspect and service the flap attach bolts without having to remove hinge covers. You can inspect and service other control surface hardware without having to remove or work around gap seals. There are only two gear doors to rig. The brake calipers and pads are a little easier to see in their original rearward position. There are no fiberglass wingtips, wing fairings, or dorsal gap closures to crack and need repair, and so on. Just something to keep in mind when/if you run across a pre-J model with "all the J speed mods".

Good luck with your search. If you're forced to compromise, I'd give up the speed mods first. Yes, they make the airplane faster. But not in a way that makes any operational difference to the vast majority of missions. They also make the airplane slightly more difficult to work on. That's not to say I don't think speed mods are worth it - that's a decision each owner gets to make for themselves. I'm just opining that if you find the perfect F with everything else you want and no speed mods, I'd jump on it.

... and if you're actually going to make use of your ground-based nav system - which you should to ensure you're proficient in doing so if backup is needed - I'm increasingly realizing it's just easier do this with a simple nav receiver and traditional CDI. That's a vote for a GNC-215 or -255. Yes, a GTN650 or other GPS/NAV/COM can be switched to "green needles" for ground-based nav; and you can set an OBS course on a G5/G3X/whatever. But this turns out to be fairly complex and irritating to do vs. how things work with older equipment. So much so that a few pilots I fly with who have decades of experience, are well-versed in traditional VOR/ILS operations, and also well-versed in using their high-end GPS navigator, actually have trouble setting up a simple VOR course on them. It's not that they don't understand how VORs work, it's just trouble with the number of button pushes/clicks/touchscreen events in the navigator and EFIS to get to the menu that selects the frequency and sets the course selector. The most operationally useful airplanes I fly for IFR have high-end navigators and electronic HSI displays for NAV1 - which stays in GPS mode pretty much exclusively; and an old-school KX-155 or GNC-255 with mechanical CDI indicator for NAV2.

Modern AI is almost entirely based on those same neural network principles. It's been mostly rebranded as "deep learning", but the "deep" in that jargon phrase doesn't indicate anything philosophical. It's just that the number of ranks in the neural network (i.e. it's depth) can be significantly larger, due to the availability of dramatically higher compute power. In particular, the simple-but-highly-parallel vector processors developed for high-end computer graphics in the late 90s and early 2000s turn out to be really good at neural net calculations. In 2006, Nvidia rolled out a programming library called CUDA to facilitate doing this on their GPU chips, and they've been an AI darling ever since. I'm not smart enough to know what effect all that has on modern weather forecast modeling, so I'll refrain from commenting on that. But whatever dead end neural networks ran into back in the 90s have long since been plowed wide open.

There is no set screw that I recall, at least not in our 76 F model. My recollection is that the little white plastic trim indicator is not attached to the cable except by compression fit. if you remove the transparent cover plate that covers the indicator (just conventional screws to do so), you can slide the indicator up and down on the cable with your fingers. Not easily, but with some force. Having said that, it's possible there is indeed a set screw in the indicator that I don't recall or didn't see, and I was just brute-force sliding it. Regardless of whether there's a set screw or just compression fit, if the indicator gets hung up in its sliding track somehow, moving the trim wheel in the nose down position will simply pull the cable out of the indicator. The indicator may later vibrate loose out of whatever is causing it to hang up in the track. If that happens, then rather than being secured to the cable, the indicator rides on top of it. This "sorta" still works, except that now (1) the indicator indicates more nose up trim than you actually have; and (2) as it gets hung/unhung in the track, it can exhibit the kind of random hysteresis @bixmooney is reporting. Sound advice. But when we had this problem, there was nothing wrong with the cable and its housing, and no need to remove and lubricate the cable itself. The only "hangup" was the little white trim indicator itself, and the track it rides in. Some fibers and grime had gotten into the track over the years, causing it to bind up. After cleaning and lubricating the indicator and track, all was well.

I didn't get a windscreen full of airplane, but have indeed been the guy making beautiful announcements on the wrong frequency twice (that I know of) in my CTAF career. It's a humiliating mistake. It's also made me a lot more humble about calling other pilots idiots and imbeciles. Anyway, I must have missed the multiple choice the first time around, and looks like you can't change a vote once made; but you should add one to the "I was in a NORDO aircraft causing it" category. This is the heart of the concern, but I'm not sure how anyone can truthfully answer the question. People who bemoan the NORDO conundrum are always going to claim that radio communication would have prevented the conflict in their particular sob story. But there's no way to be certain of this, and plenty of anecdotal evidence to the contrary. For example, @PeteMc's story above has nothing to do with radio equippage, or failure/refusal to use that equipment. It's just a pilot who lacked SA, made a bad plan, broadcast his bad plan, and proceeded to make position reports while executing his bad plan. That's not a NORDO problem. On the contrary, it is in fact a radio "success", because at least the bad guy's CTAF broadcasts gave others a heads-up about his lack of SA.

Couple of questions about the poll: Can you elaborate on what you mean by "conflict"? If you mean, "I would have died in a midair except for aggressive maneuvering", then I've never had a conflict like that with a NORDO aircraft. If you mean, "I had to adjust my traffic pattern to a degree bordering on unreasonable", then yeah I've had those sorts of conflicts with NORDO aircraft. Also with aircraft equipped and using the radio as well, but that's a different question. Second, does the "has radio but wasn't using" option include pilots that are trying to use the radio and failing due to pilot error/equipment malfunction? Or only the SOB that has a functioning radio and knows how to use it, but just stubbornly refuses to do so? ETA: can you make the poll multiple choice? More than one of the answers applies to me, and probably to others.

As I said in the OP, there's nothing to agree or disagree with, and no particular conclusion to be drawn. I'm just curious to see what people say bothers them, and thought others might be as well. I'm definitely not going argue that the poll indicates anything at all about what's safe, or how pilots should behave or feel. Replies are dying down, and the results are predictably bell shaped. Looks like most folks "draw the line" somewhere inside of one mile lateral and inside 500' vertical. But it's worth noting that as of this writing, 3 out of 26 respondents are uncomfortable with other airplanes inside 2nm lateral and/or 1000' vertical. So even here in a group of Mooney owners, roughly 1 in 10 pilots have pretty conservative feelings relative to the median. For what it's worth, this roughly mimics my flight instruction experience. I fly with 10-20 different clients per year, and a small handful of them are bothered by airplanes that seem to me to be too far away to worry about. If they ask me something like, "Didn't that seem close to you?", I say no, and try to have a respectful conversation with them about why. It's possible some of them change their opinion as a result of those conversations. But human nature being what it is, I think it's more likely they conclude I'm fatalistic, and/or not very smart.