toto

That was my understanding too. A bad batch of springs. The hours guidance always seemed like a poor proxy for gear cycles. One plane could have 5000 gear cycles in 1000 hours, and another one could have 500.

Never had a problem with the GTN750/Century2000 combination. Do you know any details about the scenario where they were seeing this?

Has Jonny been around here lately? We might ping him to see if he’s aware of the demand.. could make a couple bucks for the parts department. @Jonny

+1 for the MS bulk order. Just tell me where to send the check

Fair enough. I'll keep an eye out

I looked around a little bit just now, and it seems like a used WX-500 is still five or six grand, and I understand that I can’t use my old WX-1000 antenna - so installation might be expensive. It may come in under 10 grand, but still not cheap. If it were possible to reuse the antenna and just swap out the head unit, I might bite.

I'd love to trash the display and do a remote to a more modern MFD, but it doesn't sound like there's really a path forward there - short of buying a brand new remote sferics device. Hard to imagine spending 10 grand on a Stormscope today, but I really do appreciate the data.

I really like the combination of ADS-B weather to watch trends and the Stormscope as the real-time confirmation. I’ve wrestled with this same thing, since my Stormscope is an early-90’s vintage. But I hate the idea of replacing a real-time display with a delayed-for-an-unknown-period-of-time display. So I keep keeping the antique green scope in the panel

If you’re looking for advanced image editing capabilities for free, there’s always GIMP.. https://gimp.org

I suspect that BRS will end up becoming a factory option for most planes. So they can say “yes” to the parachute question and end up selling half of their planes without one.

I'm interested to see what the next 10 years will bring for Cirrus. Since basically every newly-designed SEP aircraft has a parachute, and every experimental has a parachute option, we're slowly reaching a point where the "Which one has a parachute" question is answered "All of them." I wonder how Cirrus will hold up when compared to other options, all of which have parachutes.

Are there any shops that do enough of these to actually stock some springs? Maxwell? It might be worth traveling to a shop if they have one sitting there.

I don't honestly think there's any aircraft that's totally off limits. Get a good prebuy and locate any open manhole covers, then figure out whether your pain tolerance aligns with the soft spots. For every 20h/year aircraft that requires a complete overhaul after purchase, there's another one that has been sitting in a barn for five years and needs only an oil topoff and it goes 1000 hours.

I think I need an education on the difference I always thought that ANR and ANC are just different fancy acronyms for essentially the same thing. Is there a quick read somewhere on which does what?

While we're at it, they could just buy a Vision Jet - it's cheaper than an M600, and it has both a parachute and autoland.....

Well, yes - somewhat. Cessna and Piper stopped making SEP aircraft from 86-96 or so, and that certainly had some impact. The General Aviation Revitalization Act got them back in the game. Other manufacturers never stopped making SEP aircraft, but unfortunately the relative lack of competition didn’t translate into a huge increase in sales for Mooney afaict.

It's interesting. I've always understood the mid-20th century success of GA to result from returning WWII servicemen who developed a passion for aviation in the service and wanted to continue that passion in civilian life. But the peak of GA piston sales was in the late 70's, 30 years after the war ended. So you've got to think that some of the 1970's success was early Boomer kids who inherited their parents' passion for aviation and went to buy their own airplanes. What happened after that? Did the Gen X kids not inherit that aviation passion? Or their kids? I dunno, but I keep thinking that it's more about the price of admission than lack of interest.

The strange thing about it is that the basic manufacturing process has never changed for the M20. It took a lot of time to build them in the 70's, and it takes a lot of time to build them today. They never really sold enough aircraft to introduce a wildly different production line - it's been a lot of manual steps from the beginning. And I know this has been discussed a million times on MS, but if the line workers aren't making substantially more money today than they were in the 70's, and the manufacturing process hasn't changed, then why is manufacturing them today a guaranteed failure when it was (at least theoretically) profitable in the 70's? Liability is obviously some part of it - estimated to be 30% ish of the total cost of a new aircraft. And the component manufacturers are probably doing lower volume than they once were, so the cost of the components goes up. But anyway - we often discuss here how it's not possible to profitably build a plane that takes 5000 hours to produce, and we often talk about how the 5000 hours by itself is the lion's share of the new aircraft price. But I've always struggled to understand how those numbers produced profit for Mooney in the 70's and a guaranteed loss for Mooney today. For the J model, the intro price was about $41k in 1977, which is about $189k today. It's widely assumed here on MS that you couldn't sell a J today because the retail price would be far too expensive for the performance it buys (cf an SR-20 at $487k). But if the 5000 hours is the big problem, the $300k delta is still hard for me to get my head around - given that the 5000 hours hasn't changed and wages haven't gone up. Ref: http://www.mooneyevents.com/chrono.htm https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

I honestly can't imagine that kids are losing interest in flying. I suspect that some of the passion about experimentals is that they come at a much lower price point for the same performance as certified aircraft. And it might be that kit sales increase as builders sell their planes to new aircraft owners and the sellers want to build another one.

Wasn’t Al Mooney a tall guy? 6’5” or something?

Interesting. I thought the whole idea was that you try out different ideas and then you buy some kind of “ready for painting” artwork when you find something you like. But I clearly have no idea what I’m talking about

That’s the same one I posted, isn’t it?

I tried to Google this, and found an article - but I assume this isn’t it? https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/fd03665a-9127-4f79-a429-ee3607a81548/downloads/Wayne Fisher on Landing.pdf?ver=1619678278351

Doesn’t Scheme Designers have an online tool where you can choose the airframe and then play with different design ideas? (Kind of talking out my *** here, but I recall a bunch of different threads discussing similar.)

I've had a seatback break in half, requiring a pretty expensive teardown and rebuild - definitely be careful on entry/exit.