toto

Looks like the registration expired four years ago.

Also, to your point about marketing spend, I was always bothered during the Ultra marketing blitz that Mooney seemed to be marketing aircraft to aircraft owners, while some of the more interesting campaigns were from Cirrus and others (like Icon, though much less successfully) that marketed to aircraft owner wannabes and their families. I don’t honestly think there is a silver bullet pitch that suddenly sells 300 Mooneys a year, but it’s clear that those campaigns could have been more effective than they were.

There are effective ways to spend marketing money, and ineffective ways to spend marketing money - I certainly don’t think it’s a lack of marketing spend exactly. It’s a lack of sales. The point I was trying to make is that you could solve the engineering efficiency problems and the high unit cost problems if you were doing some volume. Mooney claims to be able to produce 1000 units per year at Kerrville. I’m confident that you could make money on 1000 M20s per year.

That’s what the Mooney pitch deck basically said - that they would build a four-place composite turboprop. I don’t know about that though. The cost to own and operate a turboprop today is just so far out of reach for your average flyer that I don’t see it becoming a thing - even if you could buy a new certified turboprop for $1MM. On the sales numbers.. Cirrus does well, but so does Cessna. It’s certainly not Cirrus - Vans - Cessna or something in terms of total units. Cessna often puts up 300 SEP units in a year and is competitive with Cirrus. (Technically you could lump all Textron sales together, but iirc there are so few Beech aircraft sold that it hardly matters.)

I honestly think this is what many of us assumed would happen with the Meijing investment, and I was surprised when it didn’t. I guess it’s hard to say how things would have gone if the M10 had delivered as intended.

I was suggesting a rolling backlog of 2-300 units, which would put Mooney in a top-3 spot every year. I pulled that number out of nowhere, but it seems reasonable to assume that Textron pays less for the same motor than Mooney pays simply because they can deliver repeat business. I think there’s a universe where a crack marketing team could interest 2-300 people a year to buy a Mooney. But that would definitely be “average” in terms of top SEP sales for a major manufacturer. If you’re suggesting that they would need 1970’s sales numbers in order to manufacture the M20 profitably, then I don’t see a path forward for that in this market.

I’m specifically talking about the viability of the M20 airframe. There are many on this board who have made the argument that it’s simply not possible to produce an M20 profitably today, and I’m arguing that the M20 could be manufactured profitably today if there were a market for it with some modest economy of scale.

They were asking 12M two years ago, according to a widely disseminated pitch deck.

I know that we’ve gone round and round on this topic, but I remain convinced that the M20 line would be viable today if there was demand for it. If Mooney had firm orders for 2-300 airframes, they could negotiate various discounts on components, and if there was a consistent backlog of orders, they could certainly find efficiencies in manufacturing. It’s not the case that a metal airframe is impossible to make money on. As mentioned, Cessna failed with the Columbia line, and they’ve succeeded on the old metal type certificates. And to be honest, if Mooney were able to *sell* hundreds of airframes, there would be plenty of other companies happy to build them. It’s a sales problem, I’m convinced - not a manufacturing one.

I imagine a lot That’s one crazy url

I have no idea how to solve any of these questions, but I’ll say that I have zero doubt there is a market capable of paying for 17,000 single-engine piston aircraft a year if we could just make them interested in buying. As others have said above, airplanes cost a lot of money because no one is buying them - not the other way around.

This all sounds about right. Cirrus built a “lifestyle” brand that has little to do with airplane innovation, per se. Some of the things they do differently seem preposterous - like keyless entry with a push-button fob. But if you’re a person who will drop $100k on a luxury car, you might expect similar luxury treatment on your $1MM airplane. Cirrus has their whole delivery center thing in Knoxville, where you get a fancy red carpet treatment — they hand you the keys and the flight manual and a glass of champagne or whatever. And this seems to have nothing to do with building good airplanes, but it’s a part of the lifestyle brand that looks good on social media. And it’s removed from the airplane factory, so feels more like a luxury purchase from a high-end shop. Cirrus has done a very respectable job selling airplanes in a tough market, and most of that is about better *selling* - not necessarily about making a better airplane.

That’s my understanding of the Mooney service letter as well. The instructions actually say nothing at all about remarking the airspeed indicator — they tell you to purchase a kit from Mooney that includes a new ASI with the correct markings, and then install the new AFMS after having the rudder balance test. Most of the people who are logging compliance with the service bulletin are doing it after remarking the ASI (in part, I suspect, because you can’t buy a new ASI kit from Mooney). But the SL doesn’t cover that action. Reprogramming the airspeed indications in a glass panel ASI is essentially the same thing as remarking the mechanical ASI, and neither is covered by the SL. Since this isn’t an STC, but an update to the original type certificate, and the SB+SL itself is not mandatory under Part 91, there may be significant latitude in logging compliance. I’d be interested to know A64’s insights here. SL92-1_SN24_1686-2999.pdf

This was in the US version of P&P as well. I subscribed to P&P for it

Yep. From my limited experience flying Piper retracts, it's also possible to get the gear to extend with some simple light-G maneuvering.

Out of curiosity, what were the superior features of the Eaton?

No worries. Yeah - it seems crazy that there wasn’t some kind of mechanism in the original design that would give you one manual extension in the event of a spring failure. I don’t care if it’s safety wire or a zip tie - just something that doesn’t require calling the insurance company if the tiny spring fails.

Not sure what this is about. I’m not suggesting that someone re-engineer anything - I’m just expressing surprise that it passed engineering reviews in the first place.

I know nothing at all about this, but it’s still kind of surprising to me that there isn't some sort of keep-the-thing-from-rotating-only-well-enough-to-survive-one-emergency-extension thing that stays in place when the spring breaks.

Here was the older thread, fwiw…

I think it’s linked from the mooney.com home page? Definitely cool. Someone on MS posted a link that includes the turbos and pistons together.

So what is the current MS hive mind thinking about NBS replacement? I’m on my original NBS, and to be totally honest at this point I don’t feel much difference in risk between keeping the original or rolling the dice on a replacement.

I tried to link @Hyett6420’s photo post recently, but it seemed to have been deleted. Don Kaye has a photo page online here: https://donkaye.com/infamous-1500-back-spring

I was under the impression that there was a handful of documented failures for both the Plessy and the Eaton actuators?

Blech. It's kind of hard to see how this "retrofit" is a solution to the NBS problem. You're trading one actuator with a single point of failure for another actuator with a single point of failure.