toto

I may be the only person who voted “yea” in the poll. All servos were replaced under warranty within the first year. This was due to a widely-discussed porpoising issue that the shop was unable to resolve. The servo replacements were a total cost of zero, and the problem has not recurred.

I hadn't heard this before. That's awesome.

The move to a low wing is a minor adjustment to the site picture on landing, but you’ll have it nailed after a few circuits. The Cardinal vs the Mooney .. if your goal is to fly the Mooney as your primary bird, I’d do the complex endorsement in the Mooney. No reason to introduce the Cardinal at all. Mooneys really aren’t hard to fly. Just fly the book numbers and you’ll be fine. Spend plenty of time with your instructor to gain confidence, and by the time you have your endorsement, the Mooney will feel like an old friend. You’ll forget all about model C

What are the specific areas that you’re having trouble with? We have several very experienced Mooney instructors here that might be able to help

If that’s the Concorde warranty, I’ll just say that I have been round and round with them, and I did get a partial credit, but it was a moderately painful process. I have the paperwork sitting here for #4, and haven’t submitted it yet.

I’ve had four Concorde batteries in the plane in 5 years. The shop says that they have stopped recommending Concorde because they don’t last long if the aircraft isn’t flown very regularly. I fly it about once a week. Having used Gill in the Piper forever, and not being super impressed with the product, I’m loath to swap out the Concorde for a Gill. But I’m also not excited about another annual this year where they fail the battery and I spend a grand on a new one.

Interesting. Thanks for that. I have never been in a Cirrus, and certainly haven’t flown in one with non-flying passengers. But I have been with non-flyers seeing Cirri parked on the ramp, and heard the plastic thing and the thing about the doors. I personally think Mooneys look badass, and Cirri look cheesy (especially when they were all generic white), but I’ll also readily admit that flying passengers in the Mooney requires more explanation of the seating position than in the Piper, where it’s more upright and natural.

Is this everyone’s experience with the Cirrus? I’ve never encountered a non-flyer who said anything interesting about a Cirrus, and certainly never anything about the composite materials looking modern. I’ve heard people say the doors look “weird” or that the plane “looks like plastic.” But I think people are generally familiar with metal aircraft and rivets - that’s what most current airliners look like, after all. Anyway, not challenging the ramp appeal comment that has appeared several times from several people in this thread - just curious what others have encountered.

I don’t have a way to prevent it from happening, but after buying an expensive new battery in a similar incident, part of my “put the plane to bed” procedure now is to shut off the lights in the hangar, walk over to the plane, and peer in each side to make sure the damned lights haven’t been left on.

Thanks for posting. I remember reading this review when it came out and being really excited for the future of the new models (if a bit apprehensive about the obvious payload concerns).

Cirrus sold just under 350 SEP aircraft last year, and Cessna sold just under 300. Cirrus is clearly the leader in the composite space, but Cessna is no slouch. https://gama.aero/wp-content/uploads/2020ShipmentReport-02242021.pdf

I’ll stand corrected. I knew it was a structural change, thought it was to the gear - happy to defer

There are definitely some 88s that fall into the serial number range. It’s a little bit hit and miss, because the model year and the date of manufacture don’t necessarily always agree. If you’re looking for a 2900# J, you’ll just want to get the serial and check it against the SB.

SL92-1_SN24_1686-2999.pdf

Mooney updated the type certificate to 2900# GW for the MSE, which involved some minor changes to the landing gear. Many J models after 1987 have already had the structural improvements, and are already eligible for the 2900# gross weight. If you have a J model in the right serial number range, there’s a simple SB that involves verifying rudder balance and remarking the airspeed indicator. You get an AFM supplement, and you’re good to go. It’s not an STC, and doesn’t involve any alteration to the aircraft aside from the AI marks. The aircraft is already eligible for 2900# per the original type certificate if it’s in the right serial range.

https://www.aviationconsumer.com/uncategorized/mooney-predator/ https://travelforaircraft.wordpress.com/2012/12/19/rare-predator-moodys-m20t-in-tiger-stripe/ (I think Don Maxwell is currently restoring this M20T.)

I don't necessarily disagree with anything you've said here. I was just pointing out how easy it is to recognize in hindsight that Cirrus has been successful, and then bootstrap Cirrus characteristics into a roadmap for success in building aircraft. It's too simple to look at Cirrus and say that a clean-sheet composite design or any particular performance metric is the key to Mooney's future success, because it flies in the face of all that we know about how hard it is to build a successful new aircraft business. On the cabin thing.. Honestly, if you took an average person and put them in a Citation Mustang, they would be be very uncomfortable about flying in your toy plane, and looking for a sick sack. The difference between a Mite and a Meridian seems huge to us, but to a person unfamiliar with GA, anything with less than 100 seats seems scary and tiny. I'm not saying that a Cirrus isn't comfortable, just that it's a distinction only a few of us would recognize

We have to be very careful not to look at where Cirrus is today and presume that it was an obvious and inevitable success story due to some stroke of engineering genius in 1998. There are a ton of new aircraft out there with amazing specs, and most of them will fail miserably. They have clean-sheet designs with impressive performance, and it’s easy to say that those steps are the magic elixir for aviation sales. I’m thinking about aircraft like the Pipistrel Panthera, which is an interesting engineering achievement, but has a long way to go before it’s selling 400 units a year. Cirrus has outsold a whole bunch of competing products because they’re better at sales and marketing than everyone else.

Yep, they’re all essentially hand built. Every one is a little bit different. The number I’ve seen quoted is 5000 hours, which is still astounding to me. That’s 2.5 person years of full-time work to make a little single-engine plane. There’s also the manufacturer’s liability number, which is often estimated at about 1/3 the retail cost of a new airplane. So your $900 plane is actually a $600 retail plane with a set-aside for liability. Icon tried to address the liability exposure (which is capped at 18 years per the GA revitalization act) by forcing buyers to sign a lengthy purchase agreement, but they had a tough time with the PR and backed way down. Seems like it’s probably a non-starter for other manufacturers. (Also probably not super effective.)

(Not really responding to anyone in particular, just kind of thinking out loud..) It's interesting to me that we often assume Mooney has trouble with sales because they haven't embraced composite structures more fully, or created more modern "looking" aircraft. But Cessna (which is the second-most-popular SEP manufacturer by sales - about 300 units last year versus 350ish for Cirrus) tried twice to embrace the more modern approach through acquisition. The 350/400 nee Columbia models never sold well, despite impressive performance numbers, and the 162 "Skycatcher" was targeting the training market and never sold well. Cessna seems to continue selling the heck out of metal-and-rivet designs from the 1940's. Granted, plenty of these aircraft are going to flight schools that have an existing fleet of 172s and 182s, but there are also issues with dispatch reliability and specialty knowledge/experience/tooling required for composite airframe repairs that you sidestep with a metal design. In any case, I'm pretty well convinced that the problem with Mooney isn't the product. Adding a parachute or a gross weight increase might make the product incrementally more attractive to buyers, but ultimately you just have to sell the thing. The early Cirrus aircraft had lackluster payload and good-but-not-great performance. But a crack sales team kept moving product, and incremental improvements with positive cash flow got them to the dominant position they are today. Today Cirrus is making jets and stuff, to the tune of 70 airframes last year, and still selling more SEP aircraft than anyone else.

Iirc during the best SEP days in GA, the industry produced about 17000 aircraft in a year. The SEP manufacturers today produce something like 600 aircraft annually.

That topic sounds like fun Maybe Blue on Top has some insight that’s not NDA’d? @blueontop

This may be a totally irrelevant suggestion, but ... if you have a leaky compass, the compass fluid can smell gassy. And it sometimes only leaks at certain odd times. I had a head-scratcher smell for a while that turned out to be just that.

Yeah - the slide deck must envision a major infusion of capital. If someone were to write a $1B check, it's certainly possible to execute on this business plan, but "keep the lights on" money isn't going to cut it. The problems that Mooney has are sales and marketing problems. There are very clearly buyers out there who will drop ~$1M on a SEP aircraft. The Mooney Ultras are very nice planes, and I'm confident that it's possible to sell those planes. But with the recent track record, it's hard to see how throwing money at the problem is going to fix anything without a substantially different approach to sales.

No doubt you’re right. They can’t be talking about an unpressurized bird. The market for Everest climbers just isn’t big enough