toto

Sorry, remind me to Google next time before posting: https://www.flyingmag.com/news/flying-announces-winner-of-ultimate-giveaway/

Anything new on this? I entered the contest 11 times, all by mail per the official rules, and never heard a thing. I would expect a flashy announcement of the winner with a smiling photo standing in front of an Icon A5 or whatever. @Bobbo, did you hear anything further? I had planned to send a request for the winners list, but honestly I don’t care who the winners are unless it’s me I’m also surprised that they weren’t announcing the monthly winners - that’s a standard way to drum up excitement for the grand prize.

That’s a scary looking url

It’s hard to make the OnePak pencil out if you just have a single panel mount GPS and a portable. The only thing you need to be “legal” is the $299 for the GNS .. you can auto-renew that subscription and then just update the 795 occasionally. The OnePak gets a lot more valuable when you have multiple panel-mount Garmin devices with databases, because it’s just a single annual fee for the whole panel, but ime doing it piecemeal will save some money if you have one certified unit and a portable. If money isn’t a major concern, the OnePak is very convenient. You tell them which devices are in your aircraft and they provide download links every month for exactly the databases you need.

I'm not sure whether his quotes would be different from Travers, but @Parker_Woodruff is a MooneySpace supporter and many of us use his agency. Definitely worth pinging Parker for another data point.

We could certainly make a strong argument for the M-18 Mite being the most important and influential Mooney model.

Original, Model S, or Ultra?

It’s probably not fair to put the 89 J on the list either, since the 89 J model is clearly the one against which all other Mooneys are judged

As far as I can tell, they’re black - I haven’t seen any reddish color flakes. Tanks have never been resealed, but I’ve never had an issue with leaks.

Congratulations!! Nice job

The only must-have item I take on longer trips is a credit card

Interesting.. What does the "airfoil optimization" actually involve?

At annual, the inspector noticed that there is a small amount of blue staining inside the access panel where the left outboard fuel sender lives. He thinks that the gasket is on its way out, and wants to replace it sometime (not urgently). I’m seeing these teeny tiny flakes in the fuel from that tank, only when the plane has been sitting for a week or more. The photo below shows several flakes when it sat for two weeks - normally it’s a single flake (or clean). Just wanted the hive mind for a sanity check. Does this look like debris from a failing fuel sender gasket?

Yeah, but not impossible. When the Piper was my primary ac, it wasn’t unusual for me to fly with two couples - you can get to 4x150 with 2x 170lb and 2x 130lb or whatever.

I've been on quite a few 787 flights recently that were 17-18 hours long and had nearly every seat full But for the piston single GA market, it seems most manufacturers today expect the seats/fuel tradeoff. Still, in both of the aircraft I normally fly, I can put 4x150lb adults in the plane and be under max gross weight with full fuel. And that's with the Mooney at the original 2740lb. At 2900lb, the Mooney can actually do 4x190lb adults.

Of course, but that's what's written on the tin - and every aircraft manufacturer has marketing speeds that aren't quite attainable in the real world. I don't think Mooney's 242kts is any different from Cessna's 235kts in that regard. I fly an airplane that goes 201mph even if I don't ever quite see that

You could argue then that … every aircraft is peerless Mooney has always been a hell for leather design, and when they rolled out a piston aircraft doing 242kts, they had at least the Columbia 400 / Cessna TTx on their heels. But by the time the Acclaim Ultra came out, the TTx was dead and there was nothing close in the single-engine certified piston space. A composite cabin freed up enough weight for two doors with no speed penalty, and you had a gorgeous panel with a nice leather interior. If you wanted to go 242 knots in a SEP, there was nothing else out there, and full-fuel payload was not the mission.

To be fair, the hybrid approach was also used by the Mooney Ultra models.

I'm guessing .. less than 10? I actually thought the two-door aircraft were almost peerless in the field. An Acclaim Ultra for $795k was a heck of a lot of airplane for the money, especially when compared with $1M+ for a loaded SR22. The problem with the Ultras is that there were so many questions about factory viability right when they were doing a big marketing splash to launch the new models. Sinking money into the M10 was probably the right move, and getting a legit foothold in the trainer market could well have spurred more step-up buyers to the M20s. But they just seemed to run out of money right when they needed to be closing sales, and if I were a buyer in that market, I would have been nervous. It's easy to Monday-morning QB this all now, but if they had had a press release saying they got a $100M infusion to modernize the factory and announce the two-door M20s, that might have helped ease any concerns about viability. But announcing the Ultras right after spending a ton of money developing the M10 and then canceling it might have doomed the M20s. I really enjoyed learning about this period from Ron Blum's posts here on MS and in the Mooney Flyer, and it's a shame we can't hear more from him today.

I’m not competent enough in the topic to disagree with what you’re saying here, but there are definitely examples of current metal aircraft designs that compete with composites. The Beech Denali and the Cessna Skycourier are both new metal designs. And Epic has a nice turboprop, but it’s not making TBM or Piper’s single engine turboprop business go away. Kit builders vote with their money, and there are still a lot of builders buying metal designs even decades after composite kits became available. I tend to think that the whole single-engine market has gotten so small that it’s not easily possible to draw many conclusions from the purchase stats. When your entire subject demographic is people who can drop a million dollars on a toy, it feels like it can’t be representative of the market as a whole.

I saw this a couple of times today.. Probably need Craig to look at it. @mooniac58

Getting on the ground and inspecting the gear carefully is an important part of my preflight routine, and I think there is value in it. I'm not saying that it's the only (or even the best) way of identifying damage to the truss, but my intent is to be very familiar with what's normal, so I can easily identify when something is abnormal.

If there is a lesson to learn here, this is the lesson I want to learn. When I do a preflight, every preflight, I lie on my back on the ground under each main gear well and directly behind the nose gear well. I look very carefully for anything unusual, and I’m looking at every inch of the nose gear truss for any dents or missing paint. I assume that most of us do something similar. I’m not sure how this particular damage avoided discovery during preflight, but I’d like to understand how it was hard to see or how it might have been invisible to a pilot getting ready to turn the key - so I can try to catch something similar in the future. If there are photos of this or other incidents where someone knowledgeable can point out the areas of hidden damage, I’d like to learn.

BBG is nice and still feels shiny and new. FBO is nice, cars available. I’ve never needed maintenance there, but it seems to be a full service FBO and I’d be surprised if you couldn’t get major mx if needed. It’s a bit of a hike from downtown Branson. You’ll be driving in your rental car for a while before you pass PLK and wonder why you didn’t land there. But BBG seems like a much nicer airport. Last time we flew in to Branson, we landed at BBG and stopped at PLK on the way to the hotel just to see what it looks like. PLK felt utterly deserted compared to BBG, for whatever that’s worth.

Back when I was trying to decide what to do for a panel upgrade, I spent a lot of time looking at the Dynon options, and after many years working with regular avionics shops on certified gear, it was a strange experience to talk with experimental shops about the Skyview system. The shops I have used in the past didn't know anything about Skyview, and the experimental shops didn't seem to have much experience working on certified aircraft. At this point, I have exactly one thing in the panel that doesn't have a Garmin logo on it, and that's my #2 nav/com. I also drive by Garmin HQ on my way to the airport every time, so, you know - buy local