toto

My J seats are very comfortable, but with feet on the pedals (no extensions), the yoke is definitely closer to the gut than in other aircraft. That's just part of the Mooney seating position. If it were me, I'd try flying with the extensions removed. At 5'11" I can't imagine you'd need them.

Your new seats look fantastic

Aviation Consumer covered these a few years ago. Pretty decent coverage, and they seemed to like the Inogen product. https://www.aviationconsumer.com/industry-news/editorial/o2-concentrators-inogen-aviator-is-tops/

Those may be sales demo flights.

It’s a lot of airplane for your first plane at 100 hours, but as long as you budget the transition time and you’re not too anxious to blast off on long solo cross-country flights right away, certainly possible. Probably best to start with a call to an insurance broker. Our local go-to is @Parker_Woodruff…

Curiously, they don’t list the GTN Xi units as compatible with the GSR 56. They list only the original GTNs.

At the risk of a minor threadjack.. Since y'all seem pretty knowledgeable about these things.. Is it possible to upgrade an old WX-1000 Stormscope to a remote head unit without removing all of the expensive antenna stuff that takes all of the install effort? (To avoid a major threadjack, let's say that you wanted to use a G3X for the remote display..)

Dare I ask what it means to send an SMS text message from your GTN?

Aiui, the GTN and the GTN Xi have the same touch functionality.

Ha. Yeah - I just meant: if the GTN can do WAAS, then it can do WAAS whether it’s connected to a G5 or a G3X. I didn’t mean to suggest that the G3X is identical to the G5…

Everything seems consistent with a single pilot and no passengers.. http://www.kathrynsreport.com/2021/08/vans-rv-6a-n776wh-accident-occurred.html

Think of the G3X as a great big G5. It has a lot of overlapping functionality with the G5, but the GTN is still responsible for navigation in both cases.

The Electroair mag switches remind me of the old Supercub mags (many since updated with switch covers). The Supercub has the start button on the main panel, but otherwise - same idea. ref: https://www.supercub.org/forum/attachment.php?s=18dc429e5395858b15f74a5d5f49eee7&attachmentid=7610&d=1341855811

No connection with this deal, so anything I say here is pure speculation. The only E model I could find in Kansas or Missouri is this one, linked from TAP. (Looking for a prebuy in Kansas City, I'm making a wild guess that the plane is in one of those two states.) https://www.trade-a-plane.com/search?listing_id=2395533 I don't see a fancy scimitar prop in those photos, but I do wonder whether the prop referenced by the OP was a misunderstanding (they had swapped out the prop for maintenance or whatever). If you really like the plane, it's probably worth one conversation with the seller just to see if there is an innocent explanation. Have your running shoes handy

Here's a place to start.. https://www.garmin.com/en-US/aviation/smartglidecompatibility/

The scary threshold for insurance seems to be 80. At least where high performance or complex aircraft are concerned. The UFOs have nice things to say about Avemco in this regard. https://www.ufopilots.org/post/aircraft-insurance-issues Basic advice from Parker and everyone else seems to be: don't change underwriters after 80. Stick with the same company, and keep continuous coverage.

Smart glide is offered as part of the GTN Xi software. As long as you have the latest software revision, you’ve got smart glide. (There is a standalone button you can buy for $130 plus installation, but that’s not needed for the smart glide feature.)

I know I’m being pedantic, but a new Acclaim Ultra can be bought for under 800k (I think they were listed at 769 from Mooney). I don’t know how much less a J model would cost, but the NA four cylinder engine alone would be significantly less expensive for the J.

The big thing with SVFR is that the tower cannot and will not suggest it. They’ll give you a “field is IFR, say intentions,” but they won’t offer SVFR unless you explicitly request it.

I don’t think that I would own a J model if the average annual was $7k. Part of the reason I love Mooneys is that they are well-designed and well-engineered, and that translates into simple, maintainable and efficient systems. If I didn't care about the “simple” or “maintainable,” I’d buy a PA46 and just throw money at it.

I don't really know all that much about XM, but I did subscribe to the Aviator product for a decade or so.... They only periodically send out configuration data, so it can take a long time for new provisioning to reach your radio. I suspect that it's possible to skate by for a while with service that's technically disconnected if you just never have it turned on during their config bursts.

To echo what PT said above, I think it's good to schedule maintenance as necessary during the year, and avoid lumping maintenance into the inspection interval. If the inspection really is an inspection, and you're on top of regular maintenance, the number of "gotchas" at annual time should be minimal, and limited to things that would be really hard to identify in a preflight. If an annual inspection is also a "do all of the maintenance for the year," then it's going to seem high - but should be compared against annual maintenance costs, and not just against annual inspection costs. The $3500 base annual seems insanely high to me. Here in the midwest, a $1750-1800 base inspection is pretty standard for a J model, and if you have no repairs, you can get away with a total around $2000 to $2500 including consumables. All of that being said, a new-to-you airplane always has some surprises. Every mechanic focuses on different things, and even if the plane passed its previous annual with flying colors, your new mechanic will find things wrong with it. A 10% annual the first time around seems high but not impossibly high. It's the second 10% annual that would have me looking elsewhere. My advice would be to try a different shop for #3.

Nice! Congrats

In the current insurance environment, are underwriters less likely to offer smooth policies? (Asking because I have no idea.)

Garmin EIS can display on the G3X Touch.