Vance Harral

In the roughly 20 years we've owned our airplane, we've had a handful of audio issues. Every single one of them turned out to be a loose ground somewhere. Loose audio grounds interfere with the audio performance itself. Loose grounds elsewhere in the system create electrical noise, which can translate to noisy audio. In as-purchased condition, a number of the ground connections for various electrical components in our airplane were made for convenience rather than robust design. Several were made via nearby screws that just happened to fasten into metal components. Over time, I've managed to re-wire most of those to the ground terminal block near the circuit breakers that is really supposed to be used for this, and it makes it much easier to check for bad grounds. But there are still several different locations where "things" are wired to ground. Nowadays, when we get electrical noise, the first thing I do is sigh. Then I take an ibuprofen. Then I lie down under the instrument panel and start tracing and wiggling all the grounds, one by one. Suggest you start there. It's tedious, but straightforward, and free.

This is more or less what I do when teaching unusual attitude recovery to students. Rather than taking the controls when they go heads down/eyes closed/foggles/whatever, I just ask them to keep flying the airplane however they "think" is straight and level. Then I ask them to make a 30 degree banked turn to left, then back to straight and level, then another turn, and so on. After about 60 seconds of this, having given them one last "now return to straight and level" instruction. Then I have them look up and recover. There is always some degree of amazement how far off of "straight and level" the airplane has become.

That's a nice looking panel. I'm not sure why the owner of the airplane I posted the picture of opted for the smaller 7" displays vs. the 12" displays in your pic. But my point in posting the photo was to note that the #2 NAV/COM and its accompanying CDI are "old school", even in that very high end panel. There would be plenty of room in the panel you posted for such a thing too, but that is not the choice that was made. Looks like it's just a single GTN for NAV/COM/GPS, and nothing wrong with that in a VFR airplane (maybe nothing wrong with that in an IFR airplane, but I'll leave that debate to others).

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.

Yours is a fine opinion, but not one shared by a few of my flight instruction clients, folks in FBO lobbies, and various posts on various aviation boards. Hence the original motivation for the poll. The criticism of poll choices is fair, but polling is a complicated endeavor. One must provide broad enough choices to span the range of possible responses, but not so many choices that the granularity prevents determining if there's any kind of consensus. So far, the poll seem to be settling in the "I can read the N number" range. I'm not too surprised at this, given that the sample group is comprised largely of pilots who own fast, complex singles, and have significant flying experience. My guess is that I'd get somewhat different answers from a student pilot audience. There's also the issue of what people say makes them nervous in the comfort of their office on the ground, vs. what actually does make them nervous in the air. A number of pilots I've flown with don't seem to really have any idea how far away another aircraft is, and can't estimate how long it would be to impact if they were actually on a collision course. This is especially true when their only information about the threat is its depiction on a traffic display.

This is the reason I have a hard time getting worked up about NORDO traffic. I'm convinced that most of the airplanes the pearl-clutching crowd thinks are NORDO, actually do have one or more radios onboard. But honest mistakes are made tuning or flip-flopping radios (and ironically, it's sometimes the person complaining that's actually on the wrong frequency). Sometimes the receiving pilot turned down their radio volume and forgot to turn it up. Sometimes the transmitting pilot has a mic or audio panel problem they haven't recognized. Sometimes the person complaining that an offending aircraft "made no CTAF calls" simply missed the call(s) actually made by the "offender" - and by the way, this sort of miss is made increasingly likely the more that everyone wants to have lengthy conversations on the CTAF about what their plans are for the next several minutes, and negotiating deconfliction with some other airplane nearby in the pattern on which they've fixated. I've seen every one of these situations as an instructor, and - gasp - committed a few of them myself in 35 years of flying. Bottom line, the idiot you think is NORDO may indeed be an idiot. But the odds they're actually NORDO just because it's legal to do so, are pretty low.

Portable ADS-B receivers are more susceptible, but they're not the only reason for ghost targets. You can get ghosts even with a panel-mounted ADS-B in/out transponder, and even when Foreflight knows the N number of your ownship. Most manufacturers of traffic displays have a little treatise on it. Foreflight's is at https://support.foreflight.com/hc/en-us/articles/225240087-Why-do-I-see-a-false-or-ghost-traffic-target-in-ForeFlight-Mobile . Garmin's plays it closer to the vest, but if you dig, you can find some posts about this from Garmin employees on Beechtalk and elsewhere. In my experience, ghosts seem to be correlated with maneuvering. I do a lot of maneuvering as a CFI, and my recollection is that ghosts tend to show up during steep turns, steep spirals, lazy 8s, etc. I'm sure whatever processing takes place in the stack is biased toward straight and level-ish flight.

Same at Longmont. But my one of my favorite instrument scenarios around these parts is to pretend it's 400 OVC (every great once in a while it actually is); and that we've decided to depart anyway (not unreasonable, given that in the event of a problem shortly after takeoff, there are three airports within a few minutes' flying time with precision approaches to 200' AGL). Controlled airspace starts at 700' AGL. If you're in the soup at 400' AGL, you can't VOCA, and you've got 300' of climb during which your only guidance is the ODP. This gets more interesting when the prescribed heading for entering controlled airspace is different from the radial intercept heading prescribed by the ODP (it usually is, though often not by much). All this makes for a busy departure workload: into the soup almost immediately after takeoff, right at the point you're supposed to start your ODP-prescribed turn. You already need to be thinking about identifying GLL if you've chosen to actually use your VOR radio for the ODP. And then, while possibly still in the original turn, a new turn to the ATC-prescribed "on entering controlled airspace" heading at 700' AGL. Between 700' AGL and 1000' AGL, you should be switching to the departure frequency and attempting to check in, but note that they probably can't hear you until about 1200' AGL. Don't forget your post-takeoff checklist, generally at 1000' AGL. If it's a simulated IMC training flight where I'm pretending to be Denver Approach, I'll often fail to respond to the pilot's initial check-in attempt(s), and see what they do. Hold heading while waiting a few seconds and trying again? Turn back to the ODP intercept heading to re-acquire the ODP? Try to figure out what the "vector" rules for lost comm mean when the heading you were vectored onto actually takes you away from the course in your clearance? It's a fun exercise, and really healthy for gaining proficiency and confidence. Mostly what I want to see is that the pilot (a) verifies they're steering away from the big rocks just west of the airport; and (b) does something decisive and reasonable, without panic or brain lock.

That's a really great-looking airplane! Love the colors.

I respect these fears, provided the person expressing the concern understands display zoom scale. I also find them frustrating, because every single "near miss on the tablet without visually acquiring" incident I've had, was one in which the threat target appeared out of nowhere, then disappeared from the display altogether a few seconds later. I've had about a dozen of these in the last 5-ish years. I'm 95% sure they were all ghost targets caused by failed ADS-R/ownship reconciliation, rather than real threats. Because of this, I'm no longer startled when a threat suddenly appears on the display at my same altitude, and I'm not particularly concerned about it. I do look outside intently, but that's the limit of my panic. If I ever die in a MAC that I "should" have seen coming, I suppose it might be because of complacency about ghost targets.

There's no ulterior motive in this poll, and probably no useful conclusions to be drawn. I'm just generally curious, and figured I and others might be surprised by the responses. Note that there is no universally "correct" answer, and I'm explicitly requesting that respondents refrain from criticizing other's votes. Assume you're flying in a relatively busy metropolitan area, and you recognize converging traffic, that winds up passing "close" by you. At what point does the event change from an everyday occurrence you've forgotten by the time you're tying down, to a scary story you tell for weeks/months/years after? For the purposes of this poll, it doesn't matter whether you initially acquired the threat visually or on ADS-B, and it doesn't matter how/if you maneuver to avoid them. Assume we're talking about piston single speeds here - maximum closure rate of 300 knots in the worst case, head-on scenario; but more realistically in the range of 100 knots. At what point does your sphincter tighten, and you feel compelled to "do something": maneuver, cuss, yell on the radio, whatever?