druidjaidan

79 M20K. Pretty big upgrade thanks to some luck with our finances in the last few months of last year.

Regarding insurance...there was insurance for the vendor, ELA Aviacion. A Spanish company with no actual presence. ELA Aviation, the US company who was actually there, did not have insurance. Neither did the actual aircraft. Apparently, according to the community the entirety of gyrocopters, light rotorcraft, as well as almost everything else flying out of the UL field, have no insurance whatsoever. No liability, no hull, nothing. Remember that next time you're visiting the "Fun Fly Zone". I very much regret parking in vintage parking, it's way too close to a bunch of yahoo's. I'll personally never park in Vintage again (well my new plane doesn't qualify anyway), that entire corridor is way to sketchy given what I know now about the people operating there.

Turned out he was in the hospital and then booked it home right after and went radio silent because that's what his lawyers told him to do. So here's the story as it is. We tracked him down eventually despite his Houdini act. It didn't do much good. The plane was registered to a BS LLC as you note, but that's only a small part of the issue. If you read the report and supporting docs you'll find that the pilot has suffered some severe memory loss. In fact the only thing he appears to vividly recall is that this was a "personal flight and totally not a demo flight, :wink: :wink:". Never mind that he didn't even know the name of his passenger, because we all regularly take up anonymous people that ask and don't even get their name. The pilot was an official dealer for "ELA Aviation", which totally isn't a subsidiary of the Spanish company "ELA Aviacion". ELA Aviation "was not present" at Airventure (it's just two guys renting a room in Florida anyway) and did not have a booth or anything else at Airventure. However, ELA Aviacion was there and totally paid the required liability insurance premium, but they totally didn't have people there giving demo flights. So we would need to prove that the pilot was actually giving a demo flight, that ELA Aviacion (a non US company) should be responsible for a dealer that authorized by ELA Aviation, that the insurance policy should cover a dealer in general, so on and so on. EAA in my mind totally fucked up here in no small way. There is no way they should be allowing semi official demo flights without requiring insurance from the pilots, owners, and vendors. The changes being made in response to the incident also shed some light on the story: there were pilots ignoring the briefing and being allowed to continue to operate counter to the briefing. The rules weren't being enforced. The reality is that it's likely a no win situation for us. We could sue the pilot. We could sue the vendor. We could sue EAA. All likely would have some liability, but proving it would be expensive and likely exceed our finanances. I suspect they will all get sued, by the family of the helicopter pilot due to the wrongful death. Our losses just aren't big enough to make it feasible unless we are doing it basically out of spite. Which maybe we do, I'm pissed off that EAA didn't ensure the vendors had appropriate insurance and allowed these layers of indirection to result in a pilot operating without insurance to operate in such a sensitive corridor as the ultralight pattern is. We've had a few media outlets reach out to talk about the incident and we've mostly held off so far, but perhaps now will be the time given the outcome of the report.

The final report was released today. NTSB# CEN23FA333 "A gyroplane and helicopter collided midair while maneuvering for landing in day visual meteorological conditions. The aircraft were participating in a fly-in event that provided daily pilot briefings on flight operations and procedures. During the briefings, event coordinators informed pilots that 360° turns in the traffic pattern were prohibited. Flight track information, witness statements, videos, and damage to the aircraft indicated that the gyroplane impacted the left side of the helicopter while performing a prohibited 360° turn on the base leg of the visual approach. The helicopter impacted terrain, came to rest inverted, and a postaccident fire ensued. The gyroplane impacted an unoccupied airplane. The gyroplane pilot had no recollection of the accident flight. Postaccident examinations of both aircraft revealed no evidence of mechanical malfunctions or failures that would have precluded normal operations. The circumstances of the accident are consistent with the failure of the gyroplane pilot to see and avoid the helicopter while performing a prohibited maneuver in the traffic pattern, resulting in a collision with the helicopter." Report_CEN23FA333_192738_5_16_2024 3_16_31 PM.pdf

We looked at that plane (not in person). I spoke to the seller. He was clueless about what he was selling and I helped him correct a few important points, notably that the engine had indeed been overhauled at some point, but there is still a lot wrong in the ad. Our reasons are not your reasons, but we passed on the plane without traveling to see it in person. A lot of that had to do with changing directions a bit and buying more plane than before. However, I will share my reasons for passing on this plane. In my mind, the strengths of the F are its higher usable load than most and simpler systems (J-Bar, manual flaps). If (and we did go this way to be honest) we are going to take on additional features like electric gear/flaps etc we're going to buy a J/K model. This Had a lot of mods, electric gear, flaps, wing tips, bladders I think?, not to mention the silly throttle quadrant that was installed. I does have a lot of desirable mods as well, notably the 201 windscreen and the enclosed cowl. However, most of the rest of the mods I consider undesirable in an F. I didn't want bladders (heavy and less fuel). Wing tips look nice, but add little besides weight really. Electric gear/flaps are just more complicated and heavy. Worst IMO, was the throttle quadrant, just a bad decision. Almost all of this is cosmetic or personal choice. If it fits you, it fits you so don't let my personal tastes influence you if you disagree. Every F model is a unique snowflake at this point with various owners prioritizing different things and every bird being it's own thing. It's a big part of the reason we jumped up to a K model. They are still all unique a bit, but significantly less so. I can't speak for the condition, which is the most important part, other than to exercise care since the seller knows next to nothing about the plane. It's been sitting a bit. Not terribly long, but long enough that I would expect some issues. The first annual is likely to suck (but that's par for the course when buying a plane in my experience).

I think you're on the right track, and I think I know what's happened now. I'm not an expert in this so I could be wrong (and I'm using a 252 POH rather than a 231 POH, but I figure it's got to be close). The nose gear should be negative, it's in front of the datum. However, it should be a 5in arm, not 15in. And the main gear arm is measured from the nose gear as a reference, so I think it should be 66in not 56in. Changing the arms out for my guesses gives a 43in empty CG, which is perfect and makes WAY more sense. I think we're still not going to buy this particular one, but I'll let the broker/seller know that they should get their paperwork fixed.

I just can't believe I have this right tbh. This plane appears to be totally unflyable currently and would need a ridiculous amount of charlie weights to make it usable just to fly solo. If that's right and common I need to abandon shopping for a K. I don't want to carry around a 100lbs of lead shot to out in the cargo anytime I want to go flying and the family needs more usable weight than I can afford to put 100lbs of Charlie weights in.

Early M20K. W/B shows it at an empty weight of 1930 and a CG at 33.0in. This doesn’t look like it should be a nose heavy weight champion mind you. 2 blade prop, modern avionics, factory O2 in the tail, not a rocket conversion, doesn’t even have the intercooler. I understand that modern Mooneys have a rep for forward CG, but this can’t be right can it? Even with 120 in the cargo and full fuel to pull the cg as far aft as possible this plane would be well out of CG with a single FAA standard person up front. I couldn’t get this plane into CG in any configuration, I must have something wrong right?

Considering making an offer on a 231 in central AZ. I'm based way up in WA and it isn't close enough to really push for LASAR or TopGun that I would if it was a CA plane. There's a MSC at KCHD that will be my default, but I figure I should see if there are any locals that would recommend someone, someplace else? Likely going to be a full annual for the pre-buy given its annual is due soon.

Fundamentally it's pretty simple. My insured value has nothing to do with the other party's liability. My insurance is only on the hook for the insured value obviously, that is the limit of my insurance's liability to me. If the other party had insurance I could simply file a claim on their insurance and then it becomes a debate toward a settlement. The consultations I've had with attorneys have all basically agreed on the fundamentals of what the party's liability is, who the likely liable parties are, and my roughly estimated value being correct. They also don't believe the value to be significant enough that they would be willing to take the work on contingency and none of them accept hourly at all if we wanted to pursue it. The gap is significant enough to be worth some headache to me. It's worth at least paying for some threatening letters from an attorney and investigating if ELA Gyro's had insurance and was responsible for Bruce's flight.

This is part of the reason I want to get an attorney to advise me. I've read that both Washington (my home state) and Wisconsin (where the incident occurred) both appears to apply something called the "Made whole doctrine". "In Wisconsin, the made whole rule is a legal doctrine that requires an injured party to be made whole before any insurer can recover anything. Garrity v. Rural Mut. Ins. Co., 253 N.W. 2d 512 (Wis. 1977). Thus, in situations where an injured party’s damages exceed the limited pool of funds from which he or she can recover, the injured party is given priority over the subrogated party." I don't know how that works in practice tbh. It seems complicated to say the least, how is my insurance to know what my total claim is or to agree on what my total claim is A lot is somewhat subjective or not strictly determined, what is the actual value of the plane, what will my acquisition costs be, etc. It seems like I'd need to get them to agree to a value, even if that value exceeds my insured amount, and I'm not sure what incentive the insurance company would have to do that at a value higher than my insured value. It may not actually work that way at all, hence wanting to get a lawyer to clearly provide what options we have and push back if we haven't reached the limits of what we should be pushing our insurance to do. So far though I've had very little luck getting a lawyer willing to take hourly work to provide that advise and write some demand letters to see if we can get things moving. In theory, they require all vendors to provide proof of insurance and indemnification. If this was a demo flight I expect that the EAA will try to force ELA gyro's insurance to cooperate at some level. Right now that is kind of the final path to resolving this via a 3rd party insurance settlement rather than via our own (underinsured) insurance and eating the loss. However, I don't know how to navigate to that outcome if it's even possible. But it's an avenue we are looking into. I don't know what stops ELA's insurance from going "nope, ELA didn't authorize Eric as a representative to provide a demo flight so we're not liable" other than litigation.

I don't disagree that I was underinsured, but this argument is just victim blaming. Insurance would have protected me from being "robbed", but it doesn't change the fact that the liable party(ies) will get away with it.

There is no insurance on the rotorcraft . So we're talking about my insurance that wants me to forgo pursuing the rest of the liability.

That would definitely be the least stressfull way to handle it. We'd likely be out of flying for a few years at least due to the gap in insurance vs actual loss. The emotional part of me has a hard time swallowing that I just got robbed for ~$35k because someone else crashed. Honestly, I'd probably already have taken that route if the insurance release didn't require us to forgo any additional claims against the 3rd parties in the future. That requirement also makes me disinclined to help the insurance company at all