toto

I was pretty unhappy with the Aeroshell 15w50 and was strongly considering the Victory, but based on a lot of posts here on MS, I started doing Phillips XC with CamGuard. It’s been a good experience so far.

For whatever it's worth, as someone who owns both - this is more like a two-hour practical difference. In the Cherokee with 48 gallons usable, I'm stopping for gas before getting to NM. Stopping for gas is taxi and fueling time, but also just more travel fatigue. So inevitably it's an FBO bathroom visit and probably lunch, followed by another hour in the plane. The Mooney does it in one shot easy, and I'm relatively refreshed on landing. It's a 5-6 hour trip versus a 3-hour trip, all in. That was ultimately why I bought the Mooney, and it does everything it was advertised to do (I'll note in passing that the Piper is no more than a 110-knot cruiser, and the Mooney is a solid 155. So I'd put the straight-line time at more like 3 hours versus 4+) I have a friend who goes to the ATM in Vegas and withdraws what he calls "fun tickets." I think of the cost of flying similarly. There's absolutely no way to justify any of this as transportation. It's an enjoyable way to spend free time and free money, and I won't begrudge someone tooling around the traffic pattern in a Meridian if they won't begrudge me a bunch of local flights in a Mooney - with the occasional cross country thrown in for fun

This is always highly variable. If you go with a field overhaul at a no-name shop, you could probably get an OH done for 15k. A factory overhaul could be 30k. A “named” field OH would be somewhere in between.

If you fly in to KAXX, be flexible on your departure dates. I’ve been to Angel Fire many times, but always go in to Raton (reasonable fuel prices, absolutely fantastic FBO and staff). The DA at Angel Fire is one thing, but the winds are very often a “no go” for me. The runway was built north/south because it’s constrained by terrain, but the prevailing winds are out of the west. It’s not unusual to have a 25+ knot direct crosswind, which is way too much for me if I’m already at a high DA airport. If you wait for the right day, you can get calm winds - especially in the early morning. Just have to be flexible.

I'm not sure how I became the anti-GTN person here, but it sounds like this was directed at me? To OP: The GTN is awesome, and I'm super happy with it.

I’m not sure if that was directed at my “meh” comment, but I’ll chime back in fwiw Don’t get me wrong, I love the GTN and I’m very happy with the unit. I’m certainly not a touchscreen hater, and I think that the avionics we have today are shockingly capable compared to the panel I learned to fly behind. But still - it’s definitely hard to use the touch screen in any amount of turbulence. That’s not to say that buttons and knobs are a walk in the park when you’re bouncing around, but there’s at least a tactile element to physical inputs that a touchscreen lacks. Avidyne went the other direction with their IFD units, sacrificing screen real estate for more physical inputs (and they also have a little Bluetooth FMS keyboard thingy). When I see the Avidyne and the GTN side by side, I have a strong preference for the Garmin on screen size alone - and I accept the limitations of the touchscreen as a trade off for all of that real estate.

Night and day better than the GNS. Touchscreen is meh and kind of a pain to use, but the trade off is a lot of real estate for maps and graphics goodies. The display is huge compared to either the GNS or the Avidyne.

It's not unusual for a shop to quote a flat rate for the inspection, and then any repairs or parts will be additional. My mag inspection alone was more than 3k, and invoiced with this year's annual inspection :/

I definitely don't know what I'm talking about here, so apologies if I'm way off base, but - I thought that the "Factory Service Center" is just a service center that happens to be owned by the Mooney factory. They would take on any service project that any other MSC would take on. We all sort of suspect that a mechanic employed by the factory service center would really know Mooneys, and we kind of hope that the factory service center would have really good access to replacement parts. But my understanding is that it's still basically a MSC.

Dunno. Airnav said 156nm, so I guess it depends on what kind of Mooney you’re flying

There’s a MSC at KLXT, about an hour south of Des Moines by Mooney. No personal experience with them. https://www.aopa.org/destinations/business/28446

Yeah, almost a rounding error in aviation - and they're regularly offered at about $100 off for airshow sales.

Sounds like you have way more experience with these than I do... That aircraft spruce link exhausted my full knowledge of venturi-driven vaccum instruments

It always struck me as a really difficult workload item to add to a high workload situation. It made sense in the 80's, but today a portable AHRS is so much better than the precise flight system that it doesn't make much sense even to maintain one (better to put that money in a piggy bank and buy a D3). https://dynonavionics.com/pocket-panel.php

https://www.aircraftspruce.com/catalog/inpages/venturi3.php Looks like this is targeting the experimental crowd.

So it’s blazing hot, unusually hot for June. Near 100 degrees. I found a little dollop of red grease inside the pilot's side nose gear door, apparently left there from another hot day about a week ago. So I wiped off the grease and flew today - after landing, had some more grease in the same spot. At the last annual in March, the shop had gotten a bit enthusiastic with the grease gun, and I’ve had red grease oozing from the gear everywhere since then. But this is the first time I’ve seen a glob of grease smeared on the gear door. I’ve been assuming it was just related to the blazing heat outside, maybe making the grease slightly thinner than usual. But I dunno. Is there anything to worry about with this?

@Brandt seemed to have good experiences at the factory service center. https://mooneyspace.com/topic/42070-expert-annual-in-the-midwest-where-do-you-go/?do=findComment&comment=726739

Yes, factory service center is a thing. Promoted here by Jonny back in April: https://mooneyspace.com/topic/42064-42022-message-from-jonnyservice-center/

Ugh. Dropped 32k on a WAAS upgrade shortly before the accident. http://www.avclaims.com/N41XL.html

I have entered the realm of “never going to spend new money to fix old crap.” It’s very expensive to have, e.g., an old vacuum HSI overhauled, and at the end of the day it adds zero value to the aircraft (either in resale or in capability). I would much rather spend the same money on 21st century solid-state stuff than spend the money fixing old stuff.

The NTSB tweet called it a Beech E35. Dunno. https://mobile.twitter.com/NTSB_Newsroom/status/1538225512572665856

… And while you’re flying it for a year, think about how much you want to do to the panel. If you’re going to go to #4 at some point, I’d recommend doing it all at once. I’ve done a lot of piecemeal avionics, and there’s a lot of shop time spent for each phase tearing things apart and putting them back together (not to mention paperwork, W&B, etc) that would be better to do in one big install.

There was a thing called ThermaWing at one point - I think it was only ever available for the Columbia / Corvalis. https://www.aviationconsumer.com/uncategorized/retrofit-de-icing-thermawing-impresses/

Yep, the number I always hear is 5000 hours.

The channel is called “Jet Base” - not sure whether they shoot their own video or just add their own narration. I haven’t heard of them before. https://youtube.com/channel/UC0tKancyvialONVcM57gIKg On a side-note.. the Acclaim Ultra was never a $1mil plane, was it? I thought they were marketed at $795 or some such.