Hank

Wow! It's the rare Twin Mooney! Performs like a small Twin Mustang, I've heard . . . .

Think how much they could have sold at Osh . . . .

We call ours "the Mooney" or "the plane." Not "da plane!", just "the plane" without the funny accent . . . 'cause we dont have Tattoo . . .

The left nose wheel door arm broke on mine, helpfully pointed out by the lineman while parking. Flew home gear down, called A&P on Monday, ordered new one from Lasar. The shiny new part:

The groundspeed envelope for my C, at altitude with pretty much the same power settings and IAS [usually 140-145 mph], is 68-186 knots. According to my owner's Manual, I should expect 158-164 mph [137-142 knots]. So neither GroundSpeed nor Indicated Air Speed is any good for determining performance. Thus the need to determine True Air Speed. Without scrolling, clicking and hoping to get everything right [my OAT is in ºF but the GPS wants it in ºC], there's a quick way to estimate TAS: just look at your Airspeed Indicator and add 2% for every 1000' shown on your altimeter. For 144 mph at 7500 msl, that would be 2 x 7½ = 15%, so 144 + 15% = 165.6 mph with a calculator, or 144 + 14 + 7 + a smidge = 165+ using my head. Close enough. Try this and see how it compares to your Performance Charts. Another neat thing about 7500 msl--the 15% conversion is also the same as mph-->knots, so 144 mph indicated at 7500 is also 144 knots True Air Speed. Makes the math easy.

My GPS gives groundspeed, unless I go to a back screen and enter altimeter setting and OAT. Such is life with steam gauges . . .

The Thunderbirds, like the Blue Angels, fly in dozens of shows around the country every year, each an hour or so long, and sometimes purposefully a fraction of a wingspan apart. The Mooney Caravan flies once a year, about 20 minutes, and they plan to be 1/2 mile apart until final when they shorten up to still be more than a wingspan apart to land. Not quite a good comparison . . . .

There are several monitoring our borders. These are monitoring and surveilling fellow American citizens! Do we really need Big Brother watching everywhere that everyone goes???

You young whippersnapper! I soloed at 43, PPL at 44, IA at 47. While I hope to become a UFI, flying at 93 is rather doubtful . . . .

They will never overcome the human in the left seat. Having the chute has been demonstrated to not keep people from departing into conditions that they can't handle, or to attempt flights (many safety completed, some not) that the pilot would not have tried without the chute. Very few if any will fly a plane with BRS the exact same way and mission profile that they would without it, thus the safety improvement will never be what the many apologists proclaim so loudly. And that also confounds attempts to calculate the real safety benefit, besides the fact that every situation when the chute has been pulled would not have been fatal without it.

This is how I did Alaska. Wasn't in Cali or Vegas long enough to fly . . . .

Nothing quite like beating a dead horse. Five posts? Really?????

My C has two static ports, just no tail trim to balance out, only slips. The only time I've had jssues with water in my static line was when a new IA did an annual, and apparently finished washing the plane while Imwas driving over to pick it up. The stall horn sounded as soon as I turned in the master, and his "fix" was to pull the breaker. That was the last time he touched my plane (Jan 2015). I used to religiously push both drains during preflight, but years of nothing even when parked outside in the rain has led to complacency. Guess it's time to recommit before something happens . . . . .

Call it 150 AMU for kit, engine, avionics, etc. They advertise ~1500 hours average build time. Skilled fabricators can earn $25-30/hour; benefits add another ~30% to that. So: 1500 x 30 x 1.3 = 58 AMU That's > 200 total for a basic 2-place airplane, no overhead, no administrative costs, no inventory, no inventory tax, no property or inventory insurance, no worker's comp, no liability insurance, no "extras" like fancy paint schemes, embroidered interiors, upgraded carpets / windows / avionics, no personalization and certainly no sales costs (advertising, literature, websites, photography ground and air, salaries, commission, demo flight costs, maintenance, more insurance), no warranty costs and certainly no profit . . . . Yes,mit really does take money to make money!

Just proves he's a normal human. When ABS brakes first came out, accident rates for equipped cars went down, enough so that I got an insurance discount for about three years. Then human nature asserted itself, people realized they could stop better without sliding and started driving faster and following closer because they had an "out." Accident rates went back up to where tbey had been and insurance discounts went away. Chutes in a plane are tbe same way. Long term accident rates will stabilize at normal levels as pilots figure out tbey can take those riskier fligbts, because if it doesn't work out, they can pull the chute. Like Mr. Breathless and his selfie video, which to me was more of an ad for his personal location device. In my Mooney, I'd have kept the gear up and aimed for that nice lake in the background, close to shore. That's not a good option with fixed tricycle gear, but it looks like the trees weren't, either. I'll say it again: look up Risk Homeostasis. It's human character, period, and it applies to all of us in varying degrees from one activity to another. Reminded me of the Cirrus pilot I read about in AOPA magazine who departed into low IMC, became disoriented and pullled the chute, landing a couple of miles from his point of departure. Betcha in a chuteless plane, he'd have stayed in the ground until conditions improved. So how much "safety" did his chute add to the flight? It emboldened him to make a risky flight, then kept him alive when the house won, which happens a lot when you bet against the odds . . . .

Review your logbooks, put post-its on pages to discuss with your instructor. Write paragraph numbers on post-its for flights that count, throw away the ones that don't.

And cannot be retrofitted onto our planes at any cost. So why keep harping on it???

There's no "assumption of secrecy" here, there are multiple people who "know what happened" who have stated that they will not discuss it. Video of dents on youtube is news to me, but is there any discussion there of how the metal came to be bent? You know, old fashioned hand-waving where one plane did this and another plane did that, then this piece touched that piece, God smiled and no one died? When the basic facts of what happened, when and how are hidden, there is often an assumption of guilt, which will only go away if the basic facts prove there is no guilt. But the longer they are hidden, the more difficult it will be to clear up afterwards. Waiting on the feds to release the data is petty and childish. But it will come out, and either the Caravan's reputation will be even muddier than it has just become, or it will show that there really was nothing to hide (which many people will not believe, because why would it be hidden without reason?), and once again the Caravan's reputation is mud, maybe a little less mud than if the facts are incriminating, but still mud. It saddens me to see the group-think "cover it up so no one sees anything" in this instance, when every other aviation accident is reviewed in detail, then revised as the reports come out. There's always something to learn. But I guess the great unwashed, who don't fly formation, don't have anything to learn from this incident, at least according to the great formation pilots here. Because no one else is ever close to another plane outside of the Caravan and it's sponsored training programs (yeah, right!). If you feel like the Caravan is getting beat on now, it will only intensify as time drags and smug people withhold as much as possible. So there was an incident. That's a bad thing. But it wasn't fatal. That's a good thing. The Caravan immediately went silent, nobody is talking about it when we always discuss accidents. That's a bad thing. Caravanners are saying that "we" (non-formation pilots) have nothing to learn. That's a bad thing. We are being told that we don't even need to know what happened. That's a bad thing. We're being told to wait on the official government reports to even learn the basic facts beyond the vanilla, zero-content official statement that "two planes touched." That's a bad thing. The bad things are outweighing the good, and all of them after the initial metal-to-metal contact have been brought on by the Caravan itself. As long as the Caravan and its members behave like this, the world's perception of the Mooney Caravan will continue to degrade, and no report by the FAA, NTSB or court of law will ever bring it all the way back. And yes, the muck will rub off on all mass arrivals, all airshows and all Mooney pilots--so yes, we all have a stake in this.

Is that so? All that has been disclosed is that two non-specified parts of two particular Mooneys contacted each other in flight somewhere between Madison and Osh. Nobody who knows what happened is saying anythingat all . . . . --"King of the Mushrooms"

Welcome, @moonlighting7! While your CFII will doubtless be capable of flying your new E, please spend a few hours in Middle America with a CFI/CFII who knows how to do things the Mooney way. Then fly off with your guy and have lots of fun. Please post pictures at pickup and when you get home. And any questions you may have at any time. Also, update your avatar with your location (or at least "Colorado" so we will know the next time you post!) and model. There are probably other members near you for hangar flying.

So do lots of bright, flashing lights on the ground.

I plan to fly places within my personal minimums, and plan an alternate or two if there's a decent chance it'll go below, I try to get an alternate that won't. But I do practice to minimums, because the weather you get is what you see out the windshield. "Weather forecasts are wrong too often to trust, but right too often to ignore."

Yep! But before we speculate on all potential causes and their many preventions and solutions, we will first need to speculate randomly on how the two planes may have touched (wingtip-to-wingtip, wing to rudder, wing to stab, wings overlapped and slapped, spinner to tail, etc., etc.) and the aircraft positions and attitudes that would allow each possible type of contact . . . . Because right, we the great unwashed know only: Two planes flying formation "touched," landed safely, were repaired and flew home; No one with any knowledge of what happened is saying anything at all. And it looks like their deaf-mute act is supported by many here, and that it began on the ground at Osh instead of having an all-Caravan safety discussion (because they are all above such considerations?). Sometimes perception can be more important than reality . . . . .

OK, you comment on the color, now post a picture from the sunny side so we can see what the durn color is!! I have a non-traditional, sorta-red paint scheme, too, just not in the modern stripey style. I'll keep my pictures out of your celebration.

Find the local auto body paint supplier and take an inspection plate to them. They can match most anything, of any age and amount of fading. My guy in WV wasn't fased when I told him to be careful, they were off an airplane and would be expensive to replace, because he did the local hospital helicopter, too. My plane has 5 colors, I took several plates and had to leave them . . .