cwaters

I would argue that 80% local flying is likely the rental coming out in the projected mission. most people struggle to make true xc travel worth it with a rental so I would expect that the mission will grow slightly with a better xc plane. I firmly agree that as stated his mission is not really mooney material and certainly not K material just for the 1 time a year trip to higher DA. my wife and I always had a 500+nm requirement and that recently changed to a 1200nm trip just a few less times a year but we also saw a growth in our "burger" trips, if we were willing to spend an hr in the car to go get dinner somewhere then why not hop over a state and visit somewhere that would have been a full days drive before the mooney, yet would also be annoyingly far in a 180 or 172. not trying to start anything just food for thought.

but that J has more room for activities than the C does.

I feel the same about my J and I don't have near the avionics as you do. The J is a hard plane to beat if 80-90% of you mission doesn't call for the turbo. I got my IFR in my J (steam and a 430 non Waas) and I regularly look at the K's and always land back on my J cost per hr is better for my mission. Long xc flying and I don't really care about getting into the mid teens. I can cruise true around 150kts and burn 8.3 gph as for the high DA, I live in Co now and this is a regular thing in the summers, just don't take off at full gross and get off early in the morning and you're likely going to be fine. If you HAVE to be at max gross I would be asking other questions such as why you have to carry so much ?

It’s really only about 20deg lop not terribly deep, probably burning about 8-9gph and will land with about 20 gal left if he topped off the full 100 gal

Ok sounds good, it’s Colorado so it’s pretty dry air out here most the time. im new to the area and am told we rarely get imc we can fly in given the altitude it’s typically ice too

A mix of smooth and bumpy, flew with a fellow Mooney owner for about 2 hours in his 252 then hopped in my 201 and flew a few more approaches. hand flew (no ap) 3 approaches and an ugly hold. Clouds bases were maybe 800-1000agl out here at COS today

Today I flew a few approaches in imc for practice and currency, it was about 1.3 in imc after landing and putting the plane in the hangar I noticed water dripping from the tail and wheel well, I’ve never seen this happen never but it was my first time in really wet clouds for this long. Is this anything I should be concerned about ?

I'll cheers to that, my last leg was not supposed to have anything more than some 30 kts headwinds and just take a long time (compared to no winds) but turned out to be a rough ride with block altitude and deviation as needed

I recently flew over 1300nm across the country in my Mooney M20J. I really appreciate all the advice and guidance from everyone. I recently moved to Colorado for work and needed to relocate my plane with me. Until now my longest trip had been 450nm so this nearly tripled my longest XC to date and would cover two days. A trip of this size required a lot of planning and caused me a lot of concern. I was going to fly this trip in 3 legs over 2 days. The first day was going to be MRB to Springfield, Ohio after flying into Washington-Dulles on a united flight. The second day would be from Springfield to Colorado Springs with a stop in Lincoln, Nebraska for fuel and lunch. I spent countless hours leading up to the trip analyzing weather, NOTAMS, various airports and alternative flight paths/airports. Route, Altitude, and fuel consumption took up most of the planning. I decided to study up on some engine operations and run the engine lean of peak rather than rich of peak as I have until now. Good news is I had 10 hours of flight time to dial in my procedure. I ended up running about 25 deg lean of peak and burning about 8.5 gph while cruising about 150kts over the ground since I didn't have a hard headwind until the last leg. The trip started at the Denver Airport with a United flight to Washington Dulles. I got a great ride in a Glasair III from an east coast pilot buddy who picked my up at one of the GA FBOs. What a beast of a plane that Glasair is. “Cleared for takeoff runway 01C” and the trip was off. We flew up to MRB and without much hesitation I loaded up and got Leg1 underway to SGH to bed down for the night. The air was smooth as butter at 8,000 ft and the views were beautiful. This 273 nm leg got the XC underway. Day 2 started with a 4hr 600nm leg to Lincoln, Nebraska a class C airport with a wonderful FOB, Duncan Aviation. Departing Springfield, I overflew the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base Area B facilities and the Air Force Museum. Having spent a year and a half at WPAFB before moving to Virginia it was great to fly over the base again. This leg was wonderful again, more low fuel burn and smooth skies. Headwinds here were below 10 kts and only a handful of distant clouds to break up the clear skies. Landing at Lincoln was a little sporty with high gust factor but lucky it was nearly right down the runway. Day 2 continued with the final leg after lunch, a 387nm trip to Colorado Springs. With the high winds at Lincoln Mel the Mooney jumped off the ground and climbed like it was afraid of the runway. Leg 3 was going to prove to be the most challenging leg of the journey with strong 30kt headwinds my progress was slowed and added turbulence to the ride, I guess my luck had finally run out after 7 hrs of super smooth cruising. About half way to my destination a line of storms developed out of nowhere and rapidly, ATC was vectoring people left and right trying to stay ahead of the storm. I got bounced around in some moderate turbulence for a little while and had pretty strong up and down drafts, enough to request a 1000ft block altitude, while diverting left and right of course to avoid buildups and going through light precipitation. After getting through this weather “fun” I had to plan the landing at COS. ADSB weather showed a 22-32kts crosswind. This was well above my personal max but on an 11k or 13.5k ft runway each 150ft wide I was willing to make the approach and try it then divert should I not feel comfortable with it. As I got closer to COS I got word the airport was closed due to a wildfire and all inbound flights were being diverted to either Denver or Pueblo. I decided to divert to Pueblo since the winds were nearly right down the runway and it was getting to be a long day. As I got close to PUB I got vectored for 26L pattern. I was getting blown around with the vectors and finally just asked for the RNAV 26L and a close IAF. Weather was VMC with great visibility but I was at the end of a long day and the sun was in my eyes on approach I felt it was safer to shoot the approach and trust the instruments the whole way in to short final at 500ft. Pueblo turned out to be a great airport, several military aircraft including a T-6 and a few helos on the ramp and making approaches. The FBO had free water, hotdogs, and ice cream. The fuel prices were to be expected but a super nice and helpful crew. Since the trip was so close but still so far away I had to return to PUB to get my plane and complete the trip to Colorado Springs. I reached out to a huge network of pilot groups such as this one and found another Mooney driver that was nearby and wanted to fly. He came down to COS and picked me up. We got to meet some great Navy pilots there on their way to the California coast (a 1.5 hr flight for them) they were taking their F-18s out right after us and got to wait and watch his mighty Mooney take off. It was a rather bumpy ride down to PUB but the scenery was amazing. PUB was super busy with training traffic this might have been part of the USAF Initial Flight Training program that is based at Pueblo. After a long wait on the ground I got cleared to start my 15 min trip to my final destination. This was the longest trip of my flying time and took a lot of work to make happen from all the planning to the great help from the group here. I learned a lot along the way and ran into several new situations. I gained a few lessons learned from this trip. ATC is not perfect they are people too. By going to four larger airports new to me I ran into a few situations where I was unfamiliar with the area or airfield. Flying out of Lincoln, Nebraska and Pueblo, Colorado I was given a taxi instruction I was unfamiliar with and requested a progressive taxi. Ground was happy to help and got me rolling in the right direction. Being unfamiliar with the area surrounding an airport is also not something to be afraid of telling ATC. Springs approach told me to overfly and an area I had no idea where it was in relation to me and was a local reference. Letting ATC know I was unfamiliar with the area resulted in the controller saying ‘no problem, I’ll give you vectors to the pattern entry’. Other lessons: - You can never be overprepared - 10 min of planning can help you avoid an hour of hard flying - Know your limits, push them safely to expand but have a backup option and don’t be afraid to divert or pressured to make your original plan work out - Never be embarrassed to tell ATC you need help with something - Sometimes weather just happens, use your resources to try and avoid the worst of it - Don’t get into planning paralysis, you can only plan so far with any flight and at some point you have to start the flight and use your training I wouldn’t have been nearly as confident in the trip without the support of this group. I feel like this trip expanded my horizons as a pilot and pushed me to grow in ways I hadn’t thought of before. I am really looking forward to making more trips similar to this one in the future and keeping you all updated as I do.

Hey I have my annual coming up and recently relocated to Colorado Springs. I see Arapahoe up near Denver. Does anyone have a Pirep or other recommendation?

Can you explain a little bit. I check each of these at different parts of either run up or start up. Fuel, prop, gear are checked on start up check list and mixture, prop, and flaps are checked at the run up (yes prop full forward checked twice and when I push the throttle forward I push all three levers typically than just the throttle. Some of my other videos show different parts of the start up/run up process ( I don't put it in every video) I don't typically sit on the runway before starting to roll at all or more than a few seconds if anything so flaps and trim are the last two things on my run up checklist so that I'm ready for takeoff. I've had 1 time when trim was not set properly and that was due to doing a bunch of TO/Landings back to back and not going through my checklist (early in transition and I learned my lesson there)

Hey if you truly decide to give them nothing, you can send it to me and I'll vow to never use the term and always be a student of aviation. Or take up the cause and use the funds to start a campaign fighting PC changes in aviation.

highly recommend IFR6 for the instrument training if you're thinking accelerated training. I did it in my J last year and loved it.

Yeah reached out to him about a year ago and again more recently, I don’t recall if he was taking a list or not but no dice either way. thanks for the vector

I wouldn't mind being out there, the house I'm moving to is about half way between cos and meadow lake. I'm on the list out there that dave sends out each month but if you know anyone that wants to rent I'm going to be in the area for 4-6 years (military) so would be a solid tenant for a long time.

that is interesting, thank you for expanding my curiosity to learn more about this

This is a really interesting use case. So you would create a flight club of sorts where you are the only pilot and 20 people own the plane? with that many people how do you handle not wandering into the 135 territory ? (I know nothing of all this) Also with that many people how would you think to handle the scheduling ? Extra pilots ... how would insurance look at that ?

I would argue the flying time would increase would it not given the extra take off, climb and landing? currently thats a non-stop trip. Like I said for the 'shorter' trips maybe sub 500nm it makes a good case but longer than that and you start adding hours to a trip not minutes. I've been looking hard at a tesla to replace one of our house cars for more everyday commute and driving but then still use the ICE car for longer trips where dropping off the interstate for 15 min per stop to grab gas a bathroom is preferred to ~30 min per stop on 10+ hr road trips I think anything within 1 stop EV range (plane or car) the EV wins (in my book) but much past that and the time just seems to add up too quick I'f I'm flying far enough for the mooney to need fuel then that trip in the EV would be too long (I'm assuming based on the times presented here) I think there is a use case for it and would love to see it thrive, I think power density and market size are too lacking right now but in my lifetime (29 now) I think it will happen

Thanks, I really enjoy taking the family on these trips and, always wonder if other people will enjoy the videos. Yeah I like the stratus there but that reflection gets old sometimes, especially if we are on top of a cloud layer and clear above when its just soo bright

I would love a full electric mooney, I love my J but my hang up is that my current mission is 500nm and I do so without stopping so 3.5 hrs ish and wife and I are a few states away at the lake with family. I can't do that in an electric version can I ? at least not yet and for longer trips I feel the time difference is exacerbated. I could see it for local (<250nm) trips where youre really only going 1-2 hrs +reserves but if I want to take a vacation thats 500-1000nm away that seems like it would take too long with recharging to make the trip. And I don't know about you but I can't afford a local trip plane and a long trip plane (one electric and one ICE respectively)

My wife and I took the dog and went to a nearby airfield to watch the local Commemorative Air Force practice. Nothing too special, just a reminder of how great the mooney is at helping us get out and have fun with aviation.

sent you a pm, I think this would be a great idea. Obviously the cost of the larger hangars might be too high to make this happen but I think it would be worth looking into.

Ah so we have found the problem. I wish I had "getting ppl in an Ultra/Acclaim" money or even Acclaim money when I was 17. heck that insurance bill is what I've budgeted for a panel upgrade

ok if you have no experience where are you getting the info to conclude C/P are sloppy/floaty/slow, these may not be wrong assumptions but not 100%. a 172 is a much different plane than a M20 and about the only thing the Cherokees have in common with Mooney is they ae both low wing with a single door (most of them). - Mooney's are not harder to fly, who told you that is not truthful. they are faster, so you have to be ahead of the plane a bit more and they cleaner so they don't slow down as much. You say Cs are floaty, but nothing really floats as much as a Mooney 10kts too fast over the numbers (well maybe a 172 on floats) - What exactly is your mission (at least the 80% mission) ? are the 1-2 ppl flying with you family (spouse/kid) or friends? Friends typically line up to fly when you're training then are always busy after and you will fly mainly by yourself if banking on friends. What is the distance you are trying to cover? what is a long trip (100,500,1000nm) I feel the Mooney shines above all others at the 500nm trip - Insurance: might be prohibitive, I got my M20J last year and insurance was about 3100/yr with 100TT, 0complex, 0money; this year after getting my IR and 100in type insurance is 2500ish/yr - Side Note: I did my IFR in my plane, the school I went to (IFR6) required 50hr in my plane before they would start the training so I had to spend some time in the plane getting familiar with everything before I could start that journey. I absolutely loved getting the rating in my plane and plan to do the same with my commercial this year. Recommendation: Rent at least until solo before putting those really rough first few landings on your plane. Typically the first time you do something you're not good at it so why beat your bird learning. Finding the right plane will take time and the market is insane right now, if you can afford to rent and learn at a school right now then I would go that route and constantly be looking for the Mooney. It took me about a year to find my bird (I had high standards and lower budget), I got lucky and was ready to go when my bird came to the market (about 24hrs from it hitting the market to being on contract and setting up the pre-buy).

30K/yr really???? I've never heard of insurance reaching that high even for 0 time. Am I under a rock or is this a typo with an extra "0" ?