dkkim73

Full fuel in the Acclaim doesn't leave enough weight for 2 pax unless they are small.

*Great* pictures! It looks really clean and somewhat fighter like with the wing tanks. Very cool also you met The Great Man. I've heard him speak at Oshkosh years ago but never met him. I wonder how his new project (the ski amphib) is going. Thanks for sharing!

I wondered if he had an in flight issue mandating a descent, with distraction maybe causing a trim stall. NB this is of course all speculation. Very sad, overall. (Edit: fixed autocorrect, mandating not managing)

I think it's even cooler he built a Long EZ. I was seriously planning to build a Cozy back in the 2000's.

Good answers above and some fairly long threads on almost the same topic (might take a bit with keywords but you can probably find them). A few people here have done ab initio in a Mooney and thought it worked for them. They should be along shortly. I think that would be the minority. Agree most are better-served by a stepwise approach for multiple reasons. "Gnothi seauton" as the old maxim goes, know thyself. I would further add that, if you have limited aviation experience, you might be very discerning in other respects but not really have a basis for evaluating your own ability to do this kind of approach. A practical thing I would add to the above posts is: If you are an airplane owner/buyer you will spend a lot of time doing things that are not making you a better pilot. And you might decrease your actual aircraft availability vs. finding a good rental situation. Spitballing out of the blue: - get some hours of training, ideally through the pre-solo stage, make sure you like it - get a medical (required for the above) Yes a 172 or PA-28 is different than the Mooneys but the knowledge and skills will dovetail nicely into a foundation. You *might* have this same conversation about instrument training, but even then it's not a clear choice IMHO as a human factors guy. I think it's certainly too early to think that any time in trainers would be "wasted". As to cost-effectiveness, it could go either way. I'll leave the tax strategy to more knowledgeable people but if that's a determining factor for you, probably best to consult an appropriate planner early. HTH D

*Great* write-up! I love the practical weather stories here. Congrats and welcome.

This is a great rec. When life gives you lemons... You could also do some hard IFR sim dual. But taildragger time heals all wounds.

Coming back after close to 12 yrs off I was surprised by: 1. How behind I felt in the first hour (in a 172 to boot) 2. How quickly things came back thereafter. I will say the longbody extended the time to get the feel right, but the aviation environment, comms, IFR were all better than I thought they would be. No reason not to get dual if it's not crazy to find an instructor.

It's tricky doing medicine over the Internet, but what you describe falls into the general spectrum of decompression sickness ("the bends"). There're a broad range of manifestations, less and more serious, type I and type II, respectively. A bit discussing cutaneous symptoms is here: https://dan.org/health-medicine/health-resource/dive-medical-reference-books/decompression-sickness/diagnosing-dcs/ You might consider visiting with a doc who has some expertise in the area, ideally someone with a dive/hyperbaric certification. I never went to DMO training though I wish in retrospect I had. IIRC they will sometimes dive people after the fact. I will have to read a bit more and reflect on the comments earlier in the post where the flight doc recommended that restriction. That feels aggressive, though I've talked to a few other knowledgeable people that do not like flying the FLs in unpressurized aircraft. D

Wow, that's very cool. I have been impressed by how much you know about all the various models and their quirks, maintenance, etc, not just your own. Also appreciate how generous you are with your time in helping newcomers (e.g. me a little while ago). Hopefully I will get to meet you and some of the others at one of the meet ups. Best regards, David

This is *NOT* a criticism. Rather an acknowldgement.

Are you an AI? You summarize every post.... Prompt: "Please review the gear rigging thread and summarize it in the style of Andrew Caruso".

Was it chafing against something?

It's people like this that make me realize how much I haven't done.

You know, people debate open source as to whether it is optimal for for-profit development or not, whether it is "as effective" as a well-managed owned team, etc. Certainly the feature factory and support aspects of Foreflight are hard to beat by a small shop. Same for drawing programs and even email clients (though the latter is a success story in niches). *BUT* a big draw of open source has always been that "they can't take it away". If our favorite paid services become unaffordable or unusable, at least there's some options for GA pilots to work with. At that point, support interest might be higher. That said, either big corporations or governments can starve open source communities by other methods. Main risk to GA products would be currently free data sources. OTOH I would argue that chart and meteo info is "public infrastructure", like road signs and road cleaning, for which we pay plenty already. But hey that's like saying small airports are public infrastructure and Vector is a grift. Or a grift enabler

This is *exactly* what I was talking about with respect to killing companies with no respect. They'll enshittify random companies like rental cars, etc, but they do kill brands with actual cultural value.

It's a great service. There are some other posts about it here. Great for debriefing.

This is a thought-provoking comment. One hears a lot of received wisdom about standards and "you couldn't ever do (insert surprise here)". Then someone does it. At the risk of getting political, you could think of deals brokered, clean-sheet space launch vehicles, finding the profit in existing launch businesses and leveraging them, etc. You would think for $100M with hardcore motivated people (not just milking the budget on someone else's business plan) you could build some next-level innovation in aviation UI/UX. Assisted/augmented/annotated reality applications have crossed my mind a few times in aviation. Sounds like you are thinking similarly. Others have pointed out that there are adoption issues, cert, marketing aspects, etc, but the development cost itself is a different question. Lot of knowledge and experience on this forum.

Ah but how are you going to EMP-harden that.

LISP?

I don't begrudge the pioneers at Foreflight who benefitted from selling to Boeing their loot (hopefully they got some and not just the last venture round), but it would be great to see more of a "going concern" approach with long-term stewardship. Kind of like the 37signals software model, at least for a while. For any annoyance I've had at Garmin, it is dwarfed by their consistent quality and fairly consistent value. They were exceedingly generous with updates and legacy support early on, and have remained committed to aviation even while expanding into other niches. I was floored by the scale of their enterprise in Kansas. It's a big company.

IIRC correctly the model for a lot of PE shops is to trim costs to get revenue #s better, imputing higher valuation, and then flip. Don't know anything about these guys, though. Definitely I am not a finance guy. But I have yet to hear of any Private Equity deal that resulted in some great external creation of lasting value in any industry, though. Usually great brands becoming sad or getting chopped up. Good thing I was already on the verge of using Garmin Pilot. It won't take much to push me.

That sounds like a good outcome. Much less expensive than the other pages in the choose-your-own-adventure.

@LANCECASPER What kind of O-rings do you use? I think I made an inquiry on the fluorosilicone rings but was told they didn't have the right kind for the 2009 Acclaim. Curious if you ran this question to ground and where you get the rings.

Wow. I thought I was the only one who used that image. Great minds? And apparently us, as well...