toto

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

It’s hard to imagine that this slide deck was ever intended to be public. It’s actually a perfectly fine pitch deck for investors, where you’re on a road show and execs are available to talk through the game plan. But it’s just brutal to have this document on MS where we can tear it apart. I wonder how much investment they were seeking.

That spring isn’t manufactured by Mooney though, is it? (Serious question - I thought that Mooney just bought the springs from a fabricator.)

They talked about a turbine, but I didn’t see anything about pressurization. I assumed they were putting a PT6 on a non-inflatable bird.

Might be worth noting that EAA provides supplemental passenger liability insurance up to $1M over the limits in the owner’s policy. Parker or someone more knowledgeable than me can comment on how helpful this is, but tbh it’s part of the reason I’ll do YE flights. https://www.eaa.org/eaa/youth/free-ye-flights/ye-volunteers/insurance-coverage-for-eaa-young-eagles-pilots

https://www.ifr-magazine.com/full-issue/download-the-full-march-2018-issue-pdf/

EM could find $15M in the couch.

They mentioned a four-place turbine, but did they also mention a pressurized four place? It kind of sounded like they were talking about selling a Meridian for the price of a Matrix (but losing two seats and a pressure vessel). I actually think there’s probably a market for this sort of thing. Many of the SETP owners fly solo or with a single passenger, given the limited useful load of some of these planes. Losing two seats might bring the insurance down a hair. The icon they used for the four-place turbine gap actually looks like a PC-12 to me, which is *not* an aircraft that suffers from limited useful load

Interestingly, Aeroshell lists 21C as the top temp for W80. (This is more a marketing page than a spec page, idk.) https://www.shell.com/business-customers/aviation/aeroshell/piston-engine-oil/w80-w100-w120.html ”AeroShell W80 for cold climate regions (-17 to 21°C)”

There’s an interesting oldish Flying magazine article on this topic from the early aughts .. https://www.flyingmag.com/rules-and-fuel/

We were talking about this in another thread recently, and it sounded like the STC language is incorrect. The STC has not yet been approved, and ETA is unknown.

I certainly wasn’t trying to say that AV-1 is the best oil. It has well-documented problems. I was saying that among synthetic aviation oils, I had the best experience with AV-1 of the lot. I’m currently running XC with CamGuard in the Mooney.

Every 50 hours in my case, vs the Mobil allowance of 100 hours (which obviously was a bit optimistic). My understanding of the sludge situation was that it mostly affected big-bore Continentals. The most notable thing I remember about it was that Dick Collins had a very public fight over engine damage from the oil, which was probably the worst PR the product could have had.

Clearly a very subjective assessment Used AV-1 in an O-360 for 2500 hours with essentially no change in oil consumption and no change in compression over the life of the engine (well, the life of the overhaul, anyway). Did a major at 2500 just because it seemed like borrowed time, but there were zero problems with the engine. Started using Exxon Elite after the major, and compressions were worse with worse oil consumption (and ended up getting hit with a fun 50-hour recurring AD on ECi cylinders too). I know that the AD, oil consumption, and compression likely has nothing at all to do with the post-break-in oil (likely more to do with the break-in itself). But subjectively I liked the AV-1 better because it did everything I could ask of an oil, and nothing else

My experiences with synthetic aviation oil are something like: * Mobil AV-1 was the best by far * Exxon Elite was second-best, only used after AV-1 was pulled * Aeroshell 15w50 was never quite as good as Elite, stopped using in favor of XC+CamGuard If anyone wants to go back to AV-1 and needs to buy a case or two or ten, I might know a guy

Should be totally fine. Go crazy But seriously, as long as it’s an aviation oil and meets the SAE spec, it should be compatible with every other oil. https://www.aviationpros.com/home/article/10387125/mixing-piston-aviation-oils-will-topping-off-with-a-different-brand-weight-or-type-harm-the-engine