EricJ

Very cool! I got a ride on one several years ago and loved it. It was actually one of my favorite vintage rides, having done some others like Colling's B-24, etc.

I have an IFD540 and love it. A slide-in is a good option and can save a lot of installation cost. There may still need to be some installation work if your 430 isn't already WAAS capable, or if you want some additional audio or other instrument connectivity that isn't already there. Regardless I think it's a very good option to consider. The IFDs are very capable and many people (including myself) consider them more capable and easier to use than the Garmin options.

Probably more likely to explode over touch and goes, ROP v LOP, whether to lock the baggage hatch or not, or whether shock cooling is real or not.

Yikes! Glad that wasn't worse!

It's pretty evident that the tailwheel wasn't locked in the vid, but it also seems evident that the tailwheel appeared to stabilize before the airplane started to turn off the runway. I wouldn't conclude from the vid that it had anything to do with the accident.

I think what's happening now is different. The airports aren't going away, in fact they're getting significant capital investment, but it's all to support jets and turbines. I think DVT has a long future ahead of it, likewise with Scottsdale (SDL). In both cases, though, light GA is having a diminishing presence and that appears to be a continuing trend. The airports will still be here, but small GA airplanes won't be. They'll either disappear or have to go elsewhere.

We have periodic pancake breakfast meetings with our airport manager at DVT. A number of large new jet hangars have been built and more are in progress. He has indicated that space has been allocated for some more commercial hangars and the expectation is that new space will be available for small GA in these commercial hangars likely in the >$1000/mo level. He also indicated that there are zero plans for the city to ever build any more city-owned hangars, despite the waiting lists for large and small hangars and even shades being years long. The economics are consistent. It does make one wonder what the long-term picture will be for small GA. Maybe we just get pushed outside of the metropolitan areas and become a rural phenomena.

Same experience here. It was a hard no when I was an employee, but I don't know that it mattered because much of my travel was further than I'd have wanted to fly a GA airplane. It's the usual distinction between employee and contractor, at least if you're not a direct contractor. My actual badge when I worked at Intel. This was not intentional at all, just a consequence of me experimenting with all the wack fields that they made you fill out in the HR site. This one never showed up anywhere else, just the badge. Nobody cared.

I don't have a link, but the video has been going around on the FB Mooney pages. It doesn't show much. Edit: Actually, it's on the Airplanes and Coffee group on FB.

If you can find the "Airspeed Switch Connector" you can test the pins there for voltage. That'd at least narrow it down to before/after that connector. I'm assuming the connector is probably more accessible than the vane itself. On a J model (and others) the vane is a bitch to get at.

There's a significant history of douchebaggery, yes. $1M defamation judgement against him. https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2023/august/17/texas-court-orders-youtuber-to-pay-for-defamation Protective order for stalking a woman: https://casetext.com/case/angelle-v-gryder This barely scratches the surface. He has accusations of interfering with an NTSB investigation after he trespassed and stole evidence from a crash site in ID, a significant arrest record outside of that, etc., etc., etc. The most recent was disparaging the pilots fatally injured in the crash of the Electra in Chino just days before this crash, when the possibility of knowing what actually happened is pretty low. The examples are legion. He's not exactly a pillar of aviation society.

Aircraft spruce used to sell some pre-mixed, but I don't see it there any more. Dang...that was a handy way to get it. There's a recipe in the M20J SMM in section 28-13-00, specifically for finding leaks in fuel tanks. It's just a way to use air to spot leaks easily without using soap (or anything alkaline) that could damage aluminum.

So I tried this diverging spiral thing in my J model yesterday, a few times. Trimmed for 100 knots, cranked in 45 degrees of bank and let go. The first time was to the left, I just let it pitch down a bit and pick up speed, then recovered it. Wasn't a big deal, limiting the pitch-up rate was kind of a non-event, about as one would expect being at a speed higher than trimmed. Since that was fairly benign, the second time I just let it go and see what it'd do. It very slowly started rolling toward level and pitching up on its own (before it got to 160 kts), rolled to the right and pitched back down, kind of the expected phugoid but with some roll. That time the roll to the right started slowly increasing bank as it was continuing to pitch down, so I recovered it which was not a big deal (in VMC and paying attention to what it was doing). It seemed like maybe my airplane behaves a little differently doing this to the right than to the left, so I tried initiating one to the right. It was very slowly increasing roll as it pitched down so I recovered it once it was evident what it was doing. The roll increase was much slower than what the Bonanza appeared to be doing. These weren't super-well-controlled experiments, so I wouldn't conclude much based on just these three tries, other than my airplane seems to behave differently depending on the direction. It was kinda fun, so I'll probably try some more later. It may be that there's some rigging dependency, which could mean every airplane (well, every Mooney, anyway) may behave a little differently.

Generally there are gaps/holes/seams all over the bottom of the airplane, and the only thing separating you from that is a floor with a lot of gaps/holes/seams, and the space in between them is open to the tail, where there are also a lot of gaps/holes/seams. That's all in addition to the firewall, doors, etc. Usually there's not just one way that stuff is getting in, but there may be a "biggest contributor" that you can plug up to make a difference. Helped a buddy try to seal up an IAR a couple years ago and it was basically the entire airplane was leaky. We did a lot with a leaf blower and soapless bubbles. I did similar on my airplane but it was a bit easier to get it down to reading small numbers on the CO detector. I don't think it's worth trying to plug every hole. If the CO reads small numbers most of the time and zero or close to it in cruise, that's good performance.

Tolerances for new and overhauled are different, with "overhauled" allowing more slop. "Remanufactured" doesn't have a definition in the regs, but "rebuilt" describes an engine that meets "new" tolerances but may have used parts in it. So "rebuilt" and "new" both meet "new" tolerances and will be the most expensive.

Yup, so there's little motivation to spend the time to update a document, especially if changing the document might have any undesirable consequences. I don't really disagree with anything you said, but if there's no motivation to make a document change, and/or even a slight reason not to, it's not likely to happen. So it is sometimes beneficial to take note of the field experience and benefits it might provide. Sometimes "best practices" are outside of what the manuals say, and sometimes the FAA even cites that.

Is there not an ROI even considering a builder may have an appreciated asset at the end of that time?

Sometimes field experience reveals things that weren't anticipated during development. It's not an unusual thing, and it's often useful to benefit from field experience. The certification process doesn't generally allow the benefit of the field experience to go back into the documentation without disturbing the existing certification, so it's expected that that would rarely happen.

The one in Chino on Father's Day was a tragic double-fatality. Sad to have two crash so close together, but glad the second one wasn't worse. Sad to hear Gryder was commenting on the first one.

Definitely not trimmed per AC 43.13.

IMHO, it make no difference. The assumption for pretty much all airplanes this old is that they all have damage of some kind, unless they were hangar queens, which definitely degrades the value more than damage. If the repairs were done properly it should be a non-issue. "Damage history" or "missing logs" causing devaluation are pretty much just tactics used by buyers to try to negotiate the price down. Damage repaired properly (which is easy to do for a gear-up on a Mooney) or missing logs have pretty much zero impact on the utility of the aircraft.

As mentioned this is really up to your employer. In the past when I've done comparable stuff (as a contractor) it was usually to meet others at a meeting, and usually whoever I was reporting through was in that meeting. I'd get a copy of their airline ticket cost and just bill that, because they were fine with that and it avoided having to figure out appropriate rates, etc., etc. This is generally way easier as a contractor, since it's just another expense that gets approved or not. With employees you're generally on your employer's insurance and accounting rules, etc., etc., so it gets trickier.

Plus the probes and modern ignition harnesses have better shielding than similar systems in the past. It seems like ignition interference happens a lot less than it used to. The JPI probes systems seem to be very well engineered and shielded, so that seems to help, too.

Who overhauled the magneto?

There might be some intereference at those frequencies that don't affect others. Sometimes the interference is local to the airspace and sometimes it comes from something on your airplane, or even in the same radio receiver that has the problem. If those frequencies work okay elsewhere then it may just be something in that airspace. Depending on a lot of things, it could affect your airplane more than others. That's just one possibility.