76Srat

I couldn't care less about FLYING being a crappy read; I hate that they bought up the other excellent resources, bundled them together with FLYING (I forgot to add above that I abhor paying ~$80.00/yr for Aviation Consumer/IFR/Aviation Safety, each, thus the bundle makes perfect sense), yet have now dropped all of the titles except for FLYING. It's a shame. But I still read the daily paper in hard copy that gets delivered to my driveway at whatever time the paper carrier decides is the proper time, sometimes (usually) a full day late anyway. But I digress . . .

FLYING has p*ssed me off for the last time. I renew every year and have since the 1980s, but also have steadily watched this great mark go down quicker than the Hindenburg. They took my bulk renewal for all 5 of their titles and removed all of them except the worst one--FLYING--without any notice but certainly with what is quickly becoming maliceaforethought. The only reason I bulk-renew every year is to get the very excellent "IFR" and "Aviation Safety" and I even found usefullness in "Aviation Consumer". Now all of those have been dropped and rolled up into the occassional single-article published in the mothership rag (FLYING). Kudos to Firecrown Media Resources (or whatever they call themselves) for taking an historically great magazine and a subset of excellent resources and dumbing them down to the basic, miniscule worthlessness that it is now, and trashing the long-standing community that soaked up all that their other excellent titles provided. Sorry to any FLYING fans out there who might be offended, but FLYING is now about as useful as an oil change shop specializing in Tesla oil changes. They've taken the equivalent of glass cockpits and removed everything but the whiskey compass (which is offensive to all whisky compasses out there). Now for the real kicker: I got an email this afternoon (in my spam folder, appropriately) asking me to "lock in my lowest renewal rate before any increases". Increasing subscription rates and decreasing content, quality and literally everything else that such a publication ever offered? Sounds about right. No thanks, FLYING. I'll be tossing your renewal offer in the bin from here on out. Just like my decades-long subscription to FLYING et al, this rant is over . . .

The wager you're pondering, and evidently looking for affirmation here, is that you'd like to: 1. Train for and obtain your PPL; 2. You'd like to do so in as complex/high-performance plane as possible; 3. You'd like to offset most, if not all expenses related to same. Well, at the risk of sounding fatherly (sorry, I suppose I am), you can't have all of those delicious morsels of cake and eat them, too. Here's why: just like any decision worth contemplating, and aside from costs themselves, buying a plane is a negotiation of range, speed and payload (meaning if you want a plane that goes further, you're likely not going to be able to carry as much; if you want a plane that goes faster, you're likely not going to be able to go further; and if you want to farther, you won't be able to go faster). This is why Mooneys are special in the marketplace (bias alert). Plane ownership really is Goldilocks. You can't sleep in all three beds or eat all three bowls of porridge at the same time--one will be "just right", for you. For us here, Mooneys scratch all of those itches in very special ways. Now, to focus on your idea to train for your PPL, congratulations. I echo the vast majority opinion here to say do that at your favorite local flight school (61 or 141) and enjoy the process. You'll be far more better off, as will the world of pilots, if you focus more on finding a CFI that you jive with and that jives with you instead of worrying about finding the right Mooney just for you to train in. Second, there are basic stick and rudder skills that you don't have until you have them. Focus more on nailing those, as opposed to learning from the start just "how to be a good complex, high-performance pilot". Stick and rudder, airspeed and airmanship are all vastly more important than becoming a competent pilot of high performance aircraft, which comes later The "cart" here is your pilot skills; the "horse" is training to become one, not the other way around. To paraphrase a prior post response: You'd never dream of putting a 15 year old student driver behind the wheel of a Formula One car, or even a WEC Porsche GT3RS. It just isn't smart. Has that been done before? Of course, but at last recollection, there aren't a lot of Sebastian Vettels or Max Verstappens out there (both piloted F1 cars to great success before they could legally drive on public roads in Europe; and each are now 4-time Drivers World Champions, but I digress). Third, in your effort to offset expenses and make it bit more palatable to your pocketbook, why couldn't you do that with a proper C172 or other capable trainer aircraft? The idea is a decent one, but you also need to understand how to manage that entire process and account for it. The fact that your AI question-creator generated the question the way it did leads me to believe that you're not opposed to hiring someone to do that for you, which is the only way to ensure its done correctly (unless you possess more skill in that department than you've disclosed here). Finally, you need to decide to pursue initial training properly, which likely will not coincide with your owning and training in a high performance, complex bird. Most folks need to acquire alot more skills that are vastly more important to the goals you've established for yourself. At the risk of being a fatalist, you will end up achieving a result, without question. The real concern for you should be which result do you want to achieve?

. . . but damn ain't that fancy air conditioned Boeing village at AirVenture nice? Let's hope they keep that for us at least one more year. It's always fun and nice to duck in there for a cool rest, once in a while. I'm also a huge fan of Boeing actually sponsoring the youth-get-in-free movement for anyone under 18 being allowed in to AirVenture for free (with a paid, ticketed adult). Don't get me started on why EAA doesn't just cover this anyway, but I digress . . .

I've enjoyed all of the info on this thread, for sure. What's funny to me is that literally none of the FF issue is vital to being able to actually fly. Am I blown away by FF and all of the EFB stuff out there? Absolutely and my two-pilot household subscribes to literally every option of such out there. That said, my teenage pilot son has never flown without any of them, ever. Me? I literally never flew with any of them until he started flying three years ago. To me, six-packs were of the baby-seal-endangering plastic ring holder thingies and round dials in a panel. To him? Only the former. Back to the OP: Boeing off-selling FF and its entire digital asset portfolio (save for that related strictly to its monitoring and airframe maintenance programs themselves) is merely the result of a board room decision and the ~14BB write-down of its core business these past few quarters. It has nothing to do with the actual value/profits/losses/core value of the digital assets themselves to Boeing's bottom line. Akin to GE Aerospace doing what it (rightly) did a few short years ago: off-selling its finance and maintenance businesses to separate units. That's all Boeing are doing here. At its core, Boeing owning anything related to EFB makes zero sense, and I argue has never made any sense. Boeing has no interest in what happens in the mind of the pilot. Its an airframer on the civil side, pure and simple. Its larger business is that of government contractor, but that's the subject of for a different day. Bottom line to me: FF and all of its kindred in the marketplace has not just been a true game-changer for how we fly our planes, it is a totally new universe that is as exciting as the actual universe way up there. Is it required for us to actually fly? Absolutely not. If we're not in favor of the next best PE group buying it up, then we can always speak with our wallets and not engage in any of it. But guess what will happen when we do that? You guessed it: absolulely nothing. As the debacle that is the debate over EAGLE/UL100, etc., we as a general aviation lobby simply don't matter for squat when it comes to what will actually happen to that which we use while flying. Same is the inevitable case for what will happen with FF, etc.

Great article, Don. I echo the expectation that it'll take regulatory agency help in softening a few of the key sticking points on certification processes, etc., especially those related to the sheer expense directly related to getting new powerplants to market that can be drop-in replacements for legacy piston-powered airplanes. The reason why those are so expensive is because of the obvious: the OEMs return on investment. As to why the factory OH route is so expensive is a mystery to me because legacy certified powerplants were monetised decades ago by the OEMs. I think its merely a marketplace commodity factor and nothing else, which will not be sustained long-term. It'll take agency and private industry partnerships to make anything sustainable happen (much like we now see taking shape nicely on the avionics side). Until then, we should be planning on spaces in the mausoleum of legacy piston airplane boneyards . . .

All good stuff here, guys. I've said it before and I'll keep saying it: Is this reality? Yes, it is the new reality. Therefore, are we still going to be staring at the top of our boots in the next 20 year timeframe and lamenting the extinction of our legacy piston fleet? And I'm including all legacy pistons in that assumption, not just our beloved Mooneys. Unless there is a drastic and universal change in equipment being available to the legacy piston fleet, it will no longer exist as we know and love it. Period. I argue that we should stop expecting the factory/field OH market to somehow come back to earth and show us a welcome "correction" as to what all of that costs. What has never been controversial or refutable is how one owner chooses to undertake such a project. As we've all discussed above in this very topic, each owner/operator is different than the next. Some might choose to overhaul/replace literally everything from the firewall-forward. Others choose to do such on an as-needed or for-cause basis. Its Ford vs Chevy at that point and that's been the prerogative since airplanes went to maintenance for the very first time ever. That will never change. What does need to change, and I argue what must change, is what we expect to happen if we stay the course and simple expect the certified piston engine marketplace to somehow all of a sudden be transformed into something we think we can all live with. Bluntly, it won't. Without new technology on the power plant side for the certified legacy piston fleet, this is a race to the bottom with only one possible result: extinction. There is no help from the newly-certified crowd (read: Cirrus et al), nor is there any help from the regulatory agencies themselves (FAA/EASA et al). Instead of lamenting and wishing for short-term solutions (which are anything but "short-term" in their pursuit) such as UL100 or other band-aid so-called solutions for existing piston power plants, we should be lobbying for and arguing in favor of replacement power plants themselves (small turbines/diesel-derivatives, etc.). This may sound like crazy talk and will be crazy-expensive, but it truly is the only way out of this mire and mess, if we truly want to save our legacy piston fleets. Where would the piston fleet be if there were no investment or tech which replaced our beloved steamguages a few decades ago? Look at what Dynon and Garmin have done for that? Could and should there be the same type of focus for the powerplant side? I argue not only should there be; there must be. Otherwise, our legacy pistons will be seen by our grandchildren in the occassional static display museums, which will be few and far between. I'll pop some popcorn and now watch the wailing and gnashing of teeth over this thought . . .

Correct that military aircraft weren't issued civilian registrations, though many civilian aircraft were used militarily (L-birds being the easiest to mention). And to clarify my earlier statement, the CAA would issue successive numbers to each manufacturer, so for example Taylorcraft would have its allotted numbers, as would Cessna/Beech/Piper, etc. So your C140 being a couple of numbers away from your neighbor's likely would have rolled out of Wichita one or two ships away from his. Either way, the earliest of registration numbers (N numbers, for the US) were successive and not vanity or custom like we can do today.

Also curious to see how the Registry will be able to reconcile this with its own regulations governing the requirements of the registration of Aircraft generally (49 USC 44101 et seq; and 14 CFR 47 and 49). In classic form, one reg requires that the FAA provide for methods of keeping your information private, but doesn't say how or where that information is otherwise supposed to be accessible, as required by the very regs that establish the Registry in the first place. You may not think this makes a hill of beans difference and that privacy is the key component here. It isn't and it makes a helluva a hill of beans difference. The very reason for Registry records in the first place is (was) to equip the enforcement agencies with the ability to find out who owns an airplane operated in US airspace***. Circa 1999, our friends at the Aeronautical Center Counsel's office in OKC issued a letter (just a letter, not a "ruling" or "regulation", but a guidance "letter" to all Registry examiners) requiring that "physical addresses be included in all 8050-1 forms filed with the Registry". How's that sit with you? Why should we have to comply with that? Nowhere in the then-regs did it require that your physical address be included in your documents filed in OKC anytime you wished to register your ownership of an aircraft once you bought it. FAA Registry documents examiners began immediately rejecting ownership and registration documents filed that didn't comply with that unpublished requirement. Perhaps some of us on here experienced this joy, which also caused some of us to operate unknowingly in violation of Registration requirements if such flights occurred beyond the 90 day "temporary" (pink copy) registration carried on board without having had the final registration card issued in the interim. Anyway, when queried about this craziness, the answer was twofold: "the FAA has been instructed by DOT and Treasury and Dept of State to require the physical location of where each US registered aircraft is to be based" and second, "the FAA has an interest in maintaining safe flight operations of all aircraft operated in US airspace". What??? Seriously, those were the answers. In reality, when pushed further on the topic and at multiple seminars following this silly unpublished change in the regs, ACC finally admitted it was so drug trafficking could be tracked more accurately and then it became a firm requirement once the disaster that was 9/11 happened. Thus, we've been required to show a physical address ever since. So guess what this triggered? Yes, you guess correctly: my aircraft is "physically located" at my hangar and I don't receive mail or notices at my hangar, because, well, my hangar doesn't have a f*cking address. The FAA hadn't thought of that. Remember the most recent debacle about requiring the "re-registration" of the triennial registration requirements? All of that was birthed by the ignorance of the FAA's own regulations about providing a proper address for registration purposes. The "physical location" of the aircraft requirement caused the removal of thousands of actual mailing addresses for FAA notices and manufacturer notices to reach the aircraft-owning pilot community. It's taken decades since to resolve. All of this to say that you may not think that what goes on at the FAA Civil Aircraft Registry affects you nearly as often as what goes on at Aeromedical, but it does. I argue it likely affects us more because the Registry records are one of the easiest ways to commit fraud using aircraft records. They're all there to see, as you wish. All of your financial data found in your loan documents on that fancy Mooney you just bought are in those FAA Registry records. Hopefully you used a proper aircraft title company in OKC and a proper aircraft lender who knows what not to include in those filings, but if you didn't, your info is there for all to see and the bad guys to exploit. Finally, think about this: next time you do a pre-buy and make an offer on a plane to purchase and you run a title search (which you should, always), how does availing oneself of these new privacy regs hurt your due diligence on important matters such as who owns the aircraft and, more importantly, who holds a valid encumbrance against that collateral? This reg is so vague and useless by its language and text that it will yet again open Pandora's box on more craziness that was never intended. Think that you'll always be able to review the records on a plane you're looking at, like we all could in the old days? Maybe and likely not, going forward. Welcome to FAA Registry Operations in the new age . . . ***Fun fact: ever wonder about those really old tail numbers you see in those really old photos, or perhaps even on the tail of some classic aircraft today, e.g. "N31178" on the tail of a 1940 Piper J-3? In the pre-DOT/pre-Civil Aircraft Registry days, circa 1958 and prior, the manufacturers assigned successive N numbers to the aircraft rolling out of their factories, which generally coincided with when that particular aircraft was registered with the Dept of War (the predecessor of our friendly, modern FAA Registry). Aside from a few exceptions through the decades, next time you're strolling the vintage ramp at Airventure, which everyone should do every year, you can safely assume that those airplanes bearing those old numbers were the "x" aircraft ever built in the US. So in 1940, N31178 (a 1940 J-3) was presumably the thirty-one thousandth and change airplane ever manufactured in the US. Seeing that there are now ~600,000+ US registered aircraft operating daily and airworthy currently (with legion more than that manufactured throughout history), I've always thought its rather cool to see an old aircraft with an old NC tail number.

This is perfect--what a great bit of advice. Thanks for supplying this and sharing your process. I still think it sucks that we have to establish multiple online accounts with the FAA (using different interfaces and even different vendors supplying the services to the FAA), just to apply for a medical or inquire/establish something with the Registry. CAMI and Civil Aircraft Registry buildings are merely a few yards away from each other in OKC. Why they don't use the same online portal will forever baffle me.

Only thing missing there, @EricJ would have been the Brady Bunch on their exciting vacation to the Grand Canyon or Uncle Jesse and Old No. 7 . . .

This I do know: donuts (and several boxes of them, and don't forget to add the apple fritters) work really well for the FBO line guys and those Little Caesars hot-n-ready $6.00 pizzas work great in the shop working on your airplane. These two small, relatively inexpensive gestures go a long way toward keeping everyone on the same wavelength. We're all human and we all make mistakes, all the time. Anyone not willing to admit this or agree with this won't be getting donuts or pizzas from me anytime soon.

^^^+1000 for @Parker_Woodruff and his attention to customer service and timely responses, etc. Just wrote a renewal with Parker yesterday and already referred a longtime pilot buddy to him who didn't know any better. Way to go, Parker.

I know, I know. I cringed right after I posted that. I was (stupidly) trying to think like an installer and forgot its as simple as designating which is which. My bad for overlooking a simplicity amidst what is usually Medusa's headdress of compliance BS.

Indeed yours is an interesting perspective, but what the ruling actually clarifies isn't the leaded versus unleaded avgas issue--it was a clear and unequivocal ruling that agencies (in this case, a county) cannot unduly deprive rightful access to something federally mandated otherwise. It just so happens that this case involves 100LL and 100UL of various types (such as they are). Unfortunately, all of aviation is on a downhill slide on this issue and literally every other issue taken up by those opposed to anyone exercising their freedom to fly. If we're truly supportive of GA overall, and I believe all of us on here are, then we need to come together and let the market bear out what should or shouldn't be available. To do anything less than that is to remain unwilling subjects to bureaucrats who truly do not have GA's best interests in mind. In fact, they have the opposite in mind: absolute abolishment. If all we do is sit back and expect to turn our heads and cough when told, then we shouldn't even expect a soft, gentle hand when asked to do so.

Interesting theory, PC. I'd be curious, however, to see how many annuals would get that wiring setup squawked by an IA for not being "i/a/w certification", etc. I could see several not signing off on that setup unless there's an approved published alternative in the installation process. Just thinking out loud here . . .

@mhoffman Just lurking to see if you have an update on this? Has to have been maddening for something like this in-flight, compounded by the fact that the remedy is replacing the gear motor. We'd love to hear how your quest to replace that went/is going. Hopefully getting one reasonably is a bit easier than milking the truth out of a politician . . .

I hear you, Mr. Cone. My take on his diatribe is less about all GA pilots being wrong about it, and more about being wrong about overlooking establishing habits that focus on maneuvering speed versus religiously and rotely (is that a word?) going for glide speed in engine-out situations, instead of perhaps better options that give you more airspeed options (such as the aforementioned maneuvering speed instead of best-glide). Quick side story: My son is going through his PPL training now as a 16 year old and has been doing so since age 15 at my buddy's local 141 and he won't even be able to take his check ride until this summer when he turns 17 (I know; cue the "why are you doing that" questions). I occasionally go up with him and his instructor and I just watch and listen. I'm amazed at what they're doing now in 141 curriculum versus the part 65 when I did mine back some 7 presidential administrations ago. To my shock and dismay, there isn't a standard "engine-out" curriculum in the C172S 141 syllabus. Instead, there are all kinds of "engine out recovery" situations. Now I'm not here to debate the ills or extol the virtues of these many stair-stepped syllabus steps to learning emergency recoveries in a 141 environment--they all have their pros and cons. What does make we amazed and astonished is how rote and routine they try to make all of them. To me, there doesn't seem to be much thought or questions around why they do them or whether there are better ways to react and recall how to recover--it's literally become a check-the-box learning and achievement environment. Case in point: in the "engine fire in-cruise recovery" portion, guess what the very first requirement is? "Turn the aircraft toward the direction of the engine fire". Seriously? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. How about establishing where you're going to put the aircraft down safely, first? If one stops long enough to think about the recovery steps in that situation, shouldn't we ask "how on God's green earth, or more accurately, how in God's blue sky are we supposed to determine 'which side the engine fire is coming from'? If you're supposed to "turn in the direction of the engine fire", shouldn't you be able to figure out which side of the cowl it's coming from first? So please tell me, even at C172S cruise speeds of ~110kt, give or take, how are you doing to determine where the flames/smoke are? You can't. Ram air physically prevents it. So what good does that kind of recovery training teach a learning pilot-to-be? I detailed all of this with my son afterward and he hadn't even thought about it that way. Most, if not all such student never would think of it that way because it isn't "in the syllabus", so they aren't supposed to think of it that way. All of that sidebar to say that as long as videos and other elements of learning that are logical and get us to actually think about an emergency situation logically, we'll all arrive safely at our destination, whether such destination is planned or unplanned. After all, that's always our ultimate goal of flying: make sure our number of landings equals our number of takeoffs, period.

Haha. Thanks for the heads-up. Have no idea who he is other than someone IMHO who's doing his best to offer yet another way to fly as safely and as competently as possible. After 40+ years in GA and transport-category aviation in one for or another (but never as a CFI, btw), I hope I've learned the most valuable lesson of all: never stop learning. Hell, I can learn a lot from a bartender, even if I don't like his or her ultimate cocktail in my glass. I can and will always be learning, all the time. Reminds me the rare time my wife was with me at our local FBO years ago in the late '90s. She asked me "does that happen often out here??" after watching our local village (airport) idiot literally ramrod his homebuilt at about a 50kt rolling high-speed turn onto the runway, midfield, and take off. My reply: "not for very long and not very many times in a row". As fate would have it, that same idiot killed himself and 6 other innocent souls (yes, 7 total) when he attempted to takeoff in high DA in a summertime, over-gross Aerostar flight. While that story has nothing to do with the Dan Gryder video I posted above, it has everything to do with my lifelong obsession with being the best pilot I can be: never stop learning and always keep your options open, no matter the situation. That village idiot locked the door on learning years prior to his death and doing so ultimately did him in. The sadness of all of that is less about losing an idiot from the pilot corps and all about losing the 6 others (all from the same family) who had no idea he was such a f*****g idiot. The video is a great reminder that we can all learn from everyone else, both good and bad. I love the approach he shows on how to quickly and easily establish the most important part of any engine-out situation: quick awareness and reaction that gives you options. If we stall in that situation, all options are removed and there is likely only one inevitable result: your family, assuming they're not in the plane with you when it happens, will not be dining at the same table as you that evening. I never want that . . .

I'm lamenting that Mooney ownership doesn't have the capital or the prerogative to do a clean sheet with these guys, or someone like them, for a new 4/5 place Mooney, with a 'chute. They'd sell 800 aircraft a year, if they did. Instead of wasting time that won't exist for the piston-powered legacy fleet much longer on things like 100UL avgas, we should be pursuing certifications like this for both legacy and clean-sheet certified aircraft. We Mooney guys shouldn't be happy watching Cirrus take the lead on something like this (they never will push a turboprop equivalent for their legacy piston fleet, for obvious reasons). We should for our legacy fleet, for equally obvious reasons.

This blew me away and is well worth the 25 minute time suck it requires to watch:

Thanks for supporting the topic, @T. Peterson. I agree with everything said on here, some more than others, of course. My hope is that we start/continue to think far beyond just the fuel issues and look to support the progress, investment and anyone who supports a more efficient/simplified certification process to give our Mooneys and their owners more options when it comes to powering them for the next generation. I submit that merely looking at the fuel equation and fuel options will certainly help in the short-term, but isn't a viable long-term solution. Only a fresh, new, innovative power plant upgrade(s) will do the trick. It's either that, or extinction of the mark will be inevitable. I'd hate to see that happen. With DOGE and the over-due look at government inefficiencies that's taking place currently, it'll only be a matter of time before we'll see our very world become a blip on the map of history (see the upcoming sea-changes to privatizing air traffic control, flight planning, etc., that is just around the corner, for example. DOGE has already held up the Euro/Canadian model as "the best" from an economic standpoint, which I can't disagree with from a pure efficiency/operating cost-benefit analysis, but I'm scrambling to find reasons to agree operationally from a user's viewpoint, primarily because there aren't near the number of operations in Canada and the whole of Europe combined in a week as we have every single day in the US). Let's not let our lack of considering other power options/engineering mean the end of the line for legacy single engine piston aviation. Fuel alternatives alone will not save it. Everyone who has expressed a concern about the outright costs of re-engining the fleet or pursuing and obtaining a completely new recip engine program for Mooneys and other legacy single engine piston aircraft is correct--it just will never make economic sense to do so. I can't argue with that. What I am suggesting is that we learn from our Cirrus brothers and sisters who, by way of not selling or marketing a "new, safer alternative aircraft", but instead have done a hall-of-fame job marketing a lifestyle brand differently than all other aviation manufacturers had ever done before, we can save the entire single engine piston fleet. What have Textron/Beech/Cessna/Piper ever done to make anyone not already involved in general aviation think that they should become involved? A lot, if you're talking about post-WWII pilots earning their civilian wings after the war and into the boomer years under the GI Bill. But literally zero after that, at least by way of marketing and innovative ways to bring in more people to GA. Zilch. Enter Cirrus. I loath Cirrus and love Cirrus, all at the same time. I loathe them for producing an inherently unstable airframe that I believe is far inferior to Mooney. I LOVE them for single handedly rescuing single engine piston aviation. Without Cirrus, we'd be stuck in the rut that Cessna/Textron have hewn through the decades of stale thinking, stale engineering and without Congressional support in tax deduction/depreciation legislation, would have run all of piston aviation into the museum by now. Sorry for the rabbit-hole of topics here on this reply to your post (to my OP), but that's my intent with this thread--get us all thinking outside the box of merely supporting a 100UL replacement, which is what we should all be doing anyway, and on to more grandiose goals of securing the operational future of all of piston aviation for the next generations and beyond. It will not survive if we're focused merely on fuels . . .

Thanks for your take on this, @jlunseth. I appreciate the concern. That said, I am thrilled that there has been the response to this topic. While I'd love to see "that all of GA should replace all of its engines", that certainly will never happen, much less happen in my lifetime. Overall, my attempt at getting us to think about a lot more than just the energy and time (and $$$) in getting 100UL replacement fuel(s) certified is time well-spent. I appreciate your take, for sure, but would never consider all of the input here not worth responding to--it's valuable insight into our collective mindset. I argue that such collective mindset should be expanded beyond just considering the benefits (and costs) associated with 100UL replacement. It should go far beyond that if we really do value preserving the utility of our Mooneys for more than a few more years.

I think your point is valid. My point, though not very well said by me, is I think people aren't disinclined to use 100UL based solely on price per gallon. I think they're disinclined to use it for the simple reason that it isn't readily available in as many places as 100LL. Obviously this will change once more and more 100UL options become available. However, I don't think the use or non-use of 100UL is due solely to it being priced higher per-gallon than standard 100LL. On the price per gallon issue, I'll always agree with you. That said, and perhaps this is more about options at TBO/OH point in time, which we'll all face in one way or another (much akin to the decisions we face when replacing panels or a panel upgrade), should we be pining for more recip technology and the options that go with that, instead of hoping for ubiquitous 100UL options to pop up everywhere? The tech and investments being made in fuel research seem to me to be a bit misplaced because we're talking about piston engine tech that is 65+ years old. Again, this is no different than restoring or reinvesting research and development in cathode ray tube television sets, which is cool for the exercise but not viable or even remotely smart going forward. By the time we have ubiquitous 100UL options, we could have far better and affordable piston recip upgrade options. We'll never get there unless we can foresee the next set of trees way ahead instead of trying to figure out how to harvest the virtually extinct species of trees we've been using for decades with little to no tech advantages.

+1 for wondering about the LoPresti cowl whereabouts/costs/availability (LASAR?). Amazing to see his cowl induction engineering influences in literally every production piston from Piper, Mooney, Cirrus. The only reason Textron/Cessna/Beech don't use his cowl designs is because they stopped aero engineering those designs when Gerald Ford left the White House.