Mooney20

If you read the complete report, then you failed to comprehend it. Given that the airplane was actually almost 200 pounds over gross, the best option was to cut the operating engine and land straight ahead. If that had been done, the aircraft would have stopped more than a thousand feet of runway remaining. That was the gist of the many articles written about the accident at the time.

My manual gear Mooney was the first retractable in which I was checked out PIC. I flew it 17 years and a little over 2,000 tach hours. From grass strips to 12,000' international airport runways, I kept the gear down until I could no longer land on the remaining runway. It's what all pilot instruction manuals recommended at the time and it's the way I was taught. I've done same in every single-engine retractable I've ever flown. I guess while I'm at it, I'll really roll a grenade in a few tents here, but I flew piston twins exactly the same way. A mentor I really respected once told me, "If you lose an engine right after takeoff in a piston twin anywhere near gross weight, you'll fly 'til you come to a two story house. Keep your gear down until you're out of runway." And it's true. I used to fly B58 Barons full of overweight and overworked executives. We were always at or near gross weight on takeoff. One time on a layover, I got out the performance charts and very precisely calculated what would be the outcome if I sucked the gear right after liftoff at gross weight and then an engine-out occurred and I elected to continue. It was pretty sobering. According to the charts, by the time the airplane reached 500' AGL, it would be FIVE MILES down range. That is with wings level climbing straight ahead! The Baron has typical engine-out rate-of-climb performance for the piston twin breed. The rate of climb seems reasonable; what kills you is the gradient of climb with an engine out. Here's a link to a twin-at-gross accident well known in the early to mid-80s where the pilot should have just closed the throttles and landed straight ahead. It was written about in all the magazines of the day: http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/AAR8008.pdf

After takeoff, establish a pitch attitude that maintains 80 mph and retract the gear when landing on the remaining runway is no longer an option. The pilot described in the beginning post will experience a prop strike sooner or later.

I assure you that backup systems are generally used to the maximum extent possible in case of a primary system failure on any big airplane. The 767 landing gear, flaps and slats are powered by the Center hydraulic system. If service from that system is lost, there are alternate means of operation for each of the affected systems. In the event of loss of Center hydraulic pressure, flaps and slats are extended by electric motors and a landing using flaps 20 is made. Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt. Normal landings use flaps 30. Some operators land normally at flaps 25. The scenario you describe, the flaps extended, stopped and didn't move again, sounds to me like a flap assymetry, which has nothing to do with hydraulics. An assymetry is when the flaps don't extend evenly on each wing. There is a component for the flaps and slats on the 767 that detects if either system is extending assymetrically. If an assymetry is detected, operation of the flaps and slats are automatically stopped and things get busy in the cockpit. In the case of a flap assymetry, a landing is made with flaps in whatever position they were in when the assymetry was detected. Also been there, done that. Well maintained big airplanes are very reliable. In many years of flying the 767, I've had one loss of Center hydraulic system (leak in a spoiler panel actuator on the right wing) and one flap assymetry (not really an assymetry at all- the detecting box was at fault, but there's no way to tell that from the cockpit).

The procedure is 18,000' at my shop. The landing and taxi lights on the nose gear are the "cleared to land" switches. Not a procedure, but widely used technique. This is on 757/767.

I don't know if your parochial school experience was in Hagerstown, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that up the road about 75 miles in Frostburg, the nuns at St. Michael's in the late '60s liberally used all manner of physical punishment, both manual and mechanical.

I transitioned from a Cherokee to a Mooney many years ago. Landing a Mooney well is all about airspeed control. You MUST be at the proper speed at flare or you will float. Don't force it onto the runway. If you do, you'll set up a porpoise with great potential for a prop strike.

I'm no longer in that airplane. Two of the partners never flew it and wanted out so the plane was sold. I'm currently without an airplane. If I get back into an airplane, it most certainly will NOT be an F33. If you're considering one, make sure you can land it in CG, as equipped, with four people and bags at the end of a trip with an hour or so of fuel left in the tanks. It was impossible in our airplane. Your DPE owns the best all-around GA airplane ever built, the Cessna 182. If you need to fill four seats with FAA adults, the baggage compartment with a reasonable amount of bags, and top the fuel tanks, that airplane is one of few that is usually capable of it. Congratulations on your accomplishment. Now get to work on that instrument rating.

I know nothing about your flying background, but those are the words of judgement, experience and an even keel. You're probably somebody that's a pleasure to fly with.

And don't conduct a flight instruction debrief in the cockpit before fueling the trainer. It's very much like the behavior at boat ramps. Boating pilots will understand.

Get some experience and fly both types and evaluate flying qualities. Then define your mission. After doing all that, choose which fits all parameters best. I owned Mooneys for years until family dynamics changed and the cost/utilization lines crossed. I bought into a 4-way partnership in an F-33A Bonanza with IO-550 conversion. Believe it or not, useful load on a given mission was about the same as my '78 Mooney 201 because of the extra fuel the Bonanza had to carry to feed the big engine. Another thing you need to check out on any airplane you're considering is W&B. The F-33 I was in had HORRIBLE aft CG issues. With four adults and 80 lbs of bags, the airplane was at the aft CG limit for takeoff. And a Bonanza CG moves aft with fuel burn. You couldn't land the airplane in CG. The best thing I can say about the Bonanza is that it was fast. Just loafing, it would do 160 knots.

You're right, no question. But autoflight outside of the CB clouds, would have been nice.

January 2, 1982. Mooney M20B. I had a Commercial certificate and Instrument rating and 800 hours with a lot of cross-country IFR time. I was plenty current and qualified for the flight. I had no qualms about punching into the low, low overcast at dusk. It was a few months after the PATCO controller's strike and the FAA had raided FSS for people, leaving them understaffed. I was trying to get a void time clearance to depart from a rural airfield. It took more than an hour to do so because I just couldn't get FSS to answer the phone. That was the only way to get a clearance on the ground in those days. This was also in the days before The Weather Channel and Internet weather. Cockpit weather displays were only a fantasy. Because of the delay, I took off with a stale weather briefing. FSS was the only weather game in town and when they gave me the clearance and that was it. No mention of the Convective Sigmet that now covered the area. There's lots more to the story, but here's the punch line: About 20 minutes into the flight, I flew through a shaft of extremely heavy rain and hail for about 45 seconds. The rain was so heavy, every crevice in the cockpit exposed to the outside had a fine mist of water coming through it. The roar of the hail was deafening. I put my hand up to the windshield because I thought it was coming in. The engine quit. I pulled the carb heat to give it an alternate air source and it came right back to life. The ride was smooth as silk. Before that encounter, I had been in and out of CB clouds where the updrafts and downdrafts had me about 1,000' either side of my assigned altitude of 4,000'. The rain was light to moderate. It was dark by then and if I was outside the CB clouds when the lightning flashed, I could clearly recognize features on the ground as if a giant flash bulb had gone off. At the bottom of one particularly viscious and turbulent downdraft, I thought, "Is this what it's like before you crash an airplane?" My wife was on board and my next thought was that her parents would really be pissed. Then I thought about one of my mentors and I knew what he'd say to me, "Drive on boy!" In other words, keep flying the airplane! And that's what I did. I remember thinking, "If this airplane hits the ground, it's going to be with the wings level." When it first started getting really rough, I extended the landing gear to help keep speed build up to a minimum in case of upset. The airplane had no autopilot, not even the PC which came on later models. I was determined that I was going to get that airplane on the ground. I truly believe some pilots crash because they just give up when faced with a grim situation. When I finally got the airplane down is when I got jelly knees. Every bit of paint on the leading edges of wings and empennage was stripped like it had been sandblasted. All the oil cooler fins were smashed flat like they had been hit with a ball peen hammer. The landing light was broken out. Remember, this was at night. When the landing light didn't work when I landed, I thought maybe water had shorted it. The carburetor air filter was smashed and deformed. Most pilots, by the time they get 1,000 hours or so, have some kind of flight where they are severely tested. Most make it, some don't. When it's your turn, "Drive on boy!"

Any of the NEXRAD products, regardless of the delivery mode, are history (about 15 minutes old) by the time it shows up on what ever display you are using. In active weather, that's an eternity. Don't rely on it in those situations, unless you want a nasty surprise. And there are coverage gaps as a poster earlier showed. If you are lucky enough to fly from an airport with a Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR) nearby, it's a great resource for departure planning. Call it up on your smart phone while holding for takeoff. It's refreshed much, much more frequently and WAY more accurate than the NEXRAD composite.

I voiced my opinion on low-time pilots in a Mooney in another thread. It was met with immediate and vigorous disagreement. Such is life on forums. Now the subject is using a Mooney as a primary trainer. A Mooney is not a particularly good training aircraft. The controls are not well harmonized- heavy in roll (especially older models), light in yaw, sensitive in pitch. It does not tolerate well ham-fisted operation during landing that a typical student pilot dishes out. Also, as mentioned, many older Mooneys have no brakes on the right side. I shudder to think about a post-solo student going out and practicing stalls in a Mooney. A simple error can have disastrous consequences if the initial error is then compounded with others. Those mistakes are easily recoverable in a Cessna 150-152-172. On the issue of comparing primary training in a Mooney with military pilots starting out in complex turbine aircraft, keep in mind that those military pilots have been through a rigorous aptitude screening process before starting their flight training. Then flight training is all they do for a couple years. It is their life. And all through the training process, those who don't measure up are washed out. They're done flying. That rarely happens in the civilian world. It's mostly self-elimination, one way or the other. For perspective, my background is all civilian. I went from zero hours to Mooney captain in 15 months. In between were a C-150 and Cherokee 140. I had instructors who ranged from great to a sadistic little prick that ended up as a Memphis Center controller (years later, I got to talk with him from the left seat of a 757). I flew A LOT, I was working full time and gained a wife at the end of it all. Thank goodness for the vitality of youth! After gaining my PPL in the C-150, I sought out mentors. By the time I bought my Mooney, I had a few hundred hours, had made many of the bone-head mistakes that low-time pilots make, but also had a lot of cross-country time, including two 700 mile+ trips. I was Mooney ready.