jlunseth

Well, what do you like to do while you are there? Treasure Cay on Abaco has a golf course. Bimini has great bonefishing and decent offshore fishing, but if winds really are howling that would be difficult on any of the islands except maybe Andros if your guide could find a sheltered spot, that is more likely on Andros than the others. Stella Maris at Long Island is a nice setup, they don't have a golf course but have recreational activities, rental bikes, boat tours, etc. and a nice dining room. You can find that kind of stuff almost anywhere except not the nice dining room. When I go to the Bahamas I like to sort of make it up for myself depending on the wx and which side of the island the wind is coming from. Rent a boat and go explore. Not big on the touristy places, too much to experience by hanging with the locals. Various islands and communities on islands have their own local gatherings and festivals. We went to Sandy Point once to go fishing, it was spring, probably early April, and we discovered while we were there that there was a local "block party" with booths selling local cracked conch, conch salad, lobster, other Bahamian specialties. We had a great time and the community is only about 700 people. We had dinner one evening with some of the bonefish guides, Patrick Roberts and some of his friends. They were all really tall so I half-jokingly said they should play basketball. They looked sort of sheepish and then Patrick said they were the Bahamian National Champion basketball team the last two years. Sandy point is really tiny, I think Oeisha's resort is the only place to stay and the "resort" is very basic, but Sandy Point is a gem and great fishing if the wind does not blow you out. It turned out that in that tiny basement room we had probably ten people who were National Champions at something, including my best friend, now deceased, who played for Lombardi for several years. Best diving if he is still at it is Brendal Stevens on Green Turtle. Good places to stay at Bluff House and the Green Turtle Club. Better check though, Dorian hit very hard in that area I don't know what has been rebuilt. Never been to Exuma. Next on my list.

I fly in the north. When I penetrate clouds and if temps are approaching freezing the pitot heat and the hot prop go on. Just from experience, temperature changes in a cloud deck are not very predictable. The rule of thumb is -2.5 dC or -4dF for every thousand feet, but it is a rule more often broken than honored by Mother Nature. Most of the time it works in our favor. Penetrating a relatively thin stratus layer in the winter with CAVU above, it will often be the case that temps are stable or even rise during an ascent through the deck, so if you expected to hit freezing level somewhere in the middle of the layer it does not happen. On the other hand, the reverse happens often enough that I always take precautions. Sometimes the temp drops much faster and does so abruptly, not on the gradient that the rule of thumb predicts. So pitot and hot props always go on before penetrating clouds where there is any question of what might happen. Just habit by now. Certainly not going to hurt anything.

I had an MX20 screen go out a decade or so ago. We bought a used market replacement. I don’t remember exactly what the problem was, but generally the screen was going bad. I had an Apollo GSP go a decade ago but that was internal, not the screen. Have seen plenty of screens develop a line or two that won’t illuminate correctly, but don’t recall that happening on avionics. I had a problem with the auto dim on my JPI. My original unit did not have auto dim. Some time after JPI came out with auto dim I sent my unit in to upgrade for CiES senders. It came back with auto dim. It would dim all the way to black and was not recoverable without rebooting the screen, which of course meant turning the Master off and on in flight, or the breaker. Even then it would auto dim to black again. Sent back to JPI, never really worked out. I think they just disabled the auto dim, the unit was better off that way.

Yup, its in the notes. Here’s an example. The Required Equipment for the J includes a “102(a). If you read down further that is a specific model of a Stewart Warner oil radiator.

When the heat is full on and no cold air added by the vent knob, the fuel switch gets hot enough that you need something, a rag or similar, to switch tanks. It is too hot to touch if it is bare metal. I am guessing the prior pilot had something rigged up to deflect the heat over the knob. I see the knob is rubber coated at this point, but it is possible it was bare metal at one point, hence the need for a deflector of some kind until the pilot found the knob cover. That is my guess. Could have been some kind of jerry-rigged cup holder also.

I have made a bunch of landings and takeoffs on grass in my 231 but don’t anymore. After awhile the novelty wears off. I was impressed by the quality of the grass fields I landed on here in MN, they were well maintained and no gopher holes, but there is not much prop clearance. Yes, it is a dream plane, very fast and relative to other aircraft it sips fuel. Like mine, for sure.

I had the occasional issue with callouts in IMC with the first unit that came out, the LHS100. As I understand it the new version of the unit, the LHS-200, takes care of this. It has a connection to the GPS that gives an airspeed input so when the airspeed is above a set level the unit won't give altitude callouts. I haven't had occasion to fly in IMC since it was installed so I have not verified. I also had the problem with not getting callouts below 200 & 100 when my new 200 was first installed. There is a Wifi settings menu and the company gives you very good instructions how to set up everything. I worked through that and the lower altitude call-outs worked. The only issue I have not resolved is that if I am doing, say, a missed approach and then climb to 3.000 for a hold, there are callouts at 1-, 2-, and 3,000 feet, and if you climb to one of those altitudes and stay there it will continuously call out the altitude like a broken record. Sometimes when that happens I do have to use the comm panel mute. There may be a resolution for it in the settings screen but I have not had time to look into it. The company has been very good about helping with issues. I really like the unit. The best part for me is that it really helps with landings. You get down to the one or two foot level, you just need to hold an attitude and let the plane settle to the runway, but you are not sure exactly how high you are or how fast the plane is falling so I sometimes have a propensity to pull up just a little, which messes everything up. When I start hearing 1 or 2 feet I know I am right where I should be and just hold the attitude. Makes for nice landings.

There was a very long thread about this as couple of years ago. I believe the OP was gsxrpilot. You might do a search. I had them installed a few years ago. As I recall it takes four senders, two per tank.

Its worse than that. The hangar where the doctor arrives and they are talking looks like the "long hangar" at Thunderbird Aviation, Flying Cloud Airport, Eden Prairie, MN. Which is where my plane is stored today. Although that would have been awhile ago, circa late 1999 or so, ten years before me and my plane were there, so don't blame me. Doesn't look anything like what is at the St. Paul airport (that's the capital, where the statehouse and the governnor's mansion are), Holman Field, although that's possible. Holman kept flooding out so much has been rebuilt.

I haven’t been in C’s very often and never a B, but when I have been there the lack of an overview from on high like a 737 is a problem. Sometimes there will be four or five ways to turn not including the inbound leg that you are on. There are plenty of signs, but which one is which? Was in MKE last summer, what a mess to taxi on and no pressure of course.

You have to be really careful about using numbers in published articles. For most part, those use marketing numbers. Yes, the numbers are probably achievable under some set of circumstances, but not if you don't want to change engines often. For example, the factory 231, which had a fixed wastegate and no intercooler, was so named because it would make 231 mph top speed. Well that's 200 kts, and what they had to do to achieve a speed like that is go up to max altitude for the aircraft where it would get best TAS and crank the engine to full power. I don't fly the factory version but I can see the numbers on my JPI that it would produce. If they did that work in Texas they would have to have waited until the dead middle of winter with very cold temps for TX in order to be able to climb to max altitude at all. Under summer conditions you will achieve Compressor Discharge Temp redline at somewhere around 15-17k and you will not be able to climb any higher. Even if you could get higher you pass critical altitude in the fixed wastegate version at around 15k and I can tell you from experience that once you do that and the power starts to fall off with further altitude the climb rate is very anemic, so whoever did the 231 top speed flight test would have to have been very patient, it would have taken maybe an hour to get up there. The Merlyn and intercooled engines can do better than that. Critical altitude is around 22.5k and CDT is not relevant. Pretty much every statement I have seen of aircraft speed fails to take into account all the variables that affect it on a given day such as OAT. All that said, my favorite cruise setting for 10k would be 34"MP/2450 RPM/11.1 GPH and at that altitude and setting I would get around 160 kts and on some days 165. After many hours of flying you discover that differences in airspeed, unless they are orders of magnitude, tend to make a difference in mere minutes in the length of a flight. You also have to account for the fact that prevailing winds at high altitudes are west to east. It rarely pays to go high if you are going west. On the other hand, when you come home, even in a lowly 231 you will routinely see cruise speeds in the 200+ kts range, and in the winter when the winds are very strong up high I have seen 300.

Thanks Paul. I was pretty sure it worked that way. My A&P has gotten progressively better at it, I think it does take some patience and some experience.

@carusoam - Exactly the problem. I have never had actually popping, just the burbling, which is partial combustion. You could certainly get popping if it were rich enough. We are just talking about best practices to manage the engine, not engine stoppage. Hopefully no one who flies a Mooney pulls the mixture out that far in flight, although we all certainly have that power. Here is my sense of it, and I am not an A&P so chalk this down to speculation. There is a mixture screw for setting the idle mix and one for the power mix. It seems like it is a little bit of a balancing act. The A&P sets the power mix, and then sets the idle mix, but the two are not completely independent. So if you ask that they make sure that you have plenty of fuel for full power ops, the idle mix is going to be a little too rich, and if you ask that they make the idle mix perfect then the power mix is going to be lean and that is worse in the turbo because it means high temps during a long climb. So I try to get them to set the power mix right and then I am the one that manages the mix at idle with the mixture control. It is actually going to be a little different each time you get the plane back from annual because the mixes are not going to be set exactly the same way every time. That’s where the pilot needs to step in and do his/her job. The issue is that the pilot has complete authority over how lean the mix is, all the way to mixture cut-off, but once the max power fuel flow is set there is nothing the pilot can do to go any richer than that, even if the engine needs it.

Well, just to be clear, the engine burbles because it is too rich. It you don’t mind operating too rich then you don’t have to lean out. The engine will not quit either if you leave it rich and let it burble, or if you lean it out during the descent and landing. I stay lean during the descent. It is possible, because the prop is helping the engine during the descent, to run the engine so lean that during the landing rollout it will stall unless you push the fuel mix in. It is not going to do that during the approach and descent unless the pilot actually pulls the mix so lean it cuts off the fuel. I have never had the engine stall during the descent and approach, and there have been quite a few of those, somewhere around 1500. It is just a matter of managing the engine. The 231 is more manual in that regard than the later turbos. Hopefully, we all learn to pull the mixture to max idle rise. At idle or taxi speed, the engine RPM’s will actually rise about 75 degrees if the engine is leaned. That is good practice, keeps the plugs clean, and is pretty much what you are doing during the descent.

Mine burbles during the descent if it is not leaned out. When I first got it, people waiting on the ground for me would express concern that the engine was missing during the approach and landing. I tried explaining the “rich for go around” thinking and eventually decided just to stay lean and to remember I need full rich if I have to go around. It’s not hard.

First let me say that I am not an “anti-vaxxer,” I got fully vaccinated as soon as I drew a slot in the lottery being held by the governmental agency, which at the time was the State of Minnesota. I have been boosted twice since. I flew many Angel Flights during the roughly two years COVID kept the world under wraps, never once getting it from or giving it to a patient. I got it once a year ago when it seemed the world was reopening and we had some family over for Thanksgiving. All, or almost all, are in health care fields and were fully vaccinated. I was fully vaccinated, but the newest booster had just come out and I had not been able to find one yet. One person had it and everyone, vaccinated or not, got it. All survived. I also want to express my deepest sympathies for the deaths and destruction caused in Switzerland and elsewhere. I just have to say that the statement that you can’t get COVID once vaccinated was a misconception is simply not true, or rather, the statement may be true but it is not what we were told. I was there. I read. I understood what I was being told. We were told the Pfizer vaccine was 96% effective in preventing the disease and the Moderna was 94%. You could not find the Pfizer vaccine in the beginning at all, because of that “information.” Here in the US we had a truly appalling misinformation campaign from our own government and official spokespersons. I think we all learned the lesson, if we needed to after so many tall tales coming out of Washington, that anything they say cannot be trusted. Some may have known that the only purpose of the vaccine was to prepare the body to fight the disease, but that is definitely not what we were told. As for the safety of the vaccines, I opened the news this morning to read a piece that the FDA is concerned about heightened TIAs in persons who have had the Pfizer. I have a little more sympathy for those who were concerned about the safety of the vaccines, safety was ignored. I will still get vaccinated, but they are not all wearing tin foil hats. Humanity was poorly served, that is all I can say. We were more misinformed by those who had, or should have had, the official information than by those simply spouting unfounded opinions. The unfounded opinions from the opinionated we can generally figure out for ourselves, but the misinformation campaign from the CDC and others, well, it took awhile for us to understand the depths of their dishonesty.

It certainly would tell you if you have a bad P lead. I have been to several of the Mooney PPP clinics, which are pretty good by the way, and the veteran instructors have made many comments about keeping the run-up short because it sucks in stones and chews up the blade. So I don’t ever do a shutdown run up, because I am always going to do a pre-takeoff run up. In other words, I do just one between flights. Was never taught a shutdown run up, that’s my excuse. It certainly would tell you if a P lead is bad. But the quick switch off and switch on does the same thing and it is pretty easy to hear if the engine is still making power in the off position. It eliminates one run-up and less wear and tear on the blade. If you are the guy paying for the blade you want to preserve it, I have been through one new blade, not cheap. I guess the trade off would be that if something happened to the mag during the flight you will only know it when you are ready to go on your next trip, only to find that you can’t. That has happened to me only twice in the 13 years I have had the plane.

JPI sets some alerts at arbitrary levels and I have noticed over time that they have removed some from my instrument. For example, there is no low fuel pressure redline for the 231, but when I first got my JPI they had set one anyway. Every time I taxied, which takes next to no fuel, the warning would come on. I learned to ignore it, but some of the instructors I flew with would ask what that was and I would have to explain. Years into the first JPI I sent it in to make it work with CiES senders and when it came back that warning was gone. So I am sure it could be changed but it would mean sending it to JPI to have it done I am pretty sure. My JPI does not alert at 1550 or 1600, there is an alert level but I don’t know what it is, I have never been brave enough to push the turbo that much, and on the one or two occasions when I have gotten an alert I have done something about it immediately.

That manual page is interesting. Do you turn the boost on for landing in the Encore? The POH for the 231 advises that the boost should only be on for emergencies, that it can cause an over rich condition in normal operations, so it is part of my checklist to see that both high and low boost are off for landing. Also, I do a brief mag check by having the engine at low idle, say 1100, and then quickly turn the ignition switch full off and then full on. You can hear the engine stop making power. The switch should be in the off position for only about a second or you will get a build-up and fuel and maybe a backfire when switched back to on. Works good. I did find a bad P-lead once, have the FBO flag the prop so the line guys would not move it and got it fixed right away. Good thing to do. I do my run up before takeoff but don’t see a reason to do one at shutdown. To much run up is how a blade gets chewed up.

@T. Peterson I am putting a new engine in this winter, the old one will be 21 years old and 600 hours over TBO. I have my fingers crossed the new one will work as well. I will certainly be doing some experimenting.

Same answer here. No leaning for takeoff or climb. Engine needs full rich fuel to stay cool. TIT and CHTs will reach marvelously high temps if you lean in that flight regime, like approaching or even exceeding the 460 dF redline for CHTs and the redline for TIT. Lean when you level off. If you are doing pattern work, lean on the downwind after you have pulled the throttle back. Here is what I do in my 231 with Merlin and intercooler. Full rich and 36-37” for takeoff, definitely not the 40” in the POH, that is an overboost if you have the intercooler. When I level off in the pattern I pull the MP to 24.5 and the fuel flow to 8.8 GPH. That is a lean of peak setting. I use the 24.5/8.8 for pattern work and it is also my approach setting. It will give you 120 kts with the gear up and 90 or so with the gear down. The setting varies a little depending on day conditions, during the hot summer for example the setting might be 25 point something to get the same speed. My target is the speed not the MP setting, I just know where to put it to get the speed I want. The plane is slick and needs a little time to slow down, so at the descent end of the downwind in the pattern I pull the MP back to 14.5 or so without touching the fuel knob. There is an interlink between the MP and fuel flow and the interlink will try to keep the same air/fuel ratio by bring the fuel back automatically. Then pitch for 90. The speed will fall off and when you make the turn from downwind to base you will need to put in more MP. At that point I am watching speed, not MP. I use 85 kts on base and 75 on final. The same settings apply for approach. I use the 24.5/8.8 as my approach speed. It will give you 120 kts with the gear up and 90 with the gear down. At the FAF when I pitch the nose over I pull the MP back to about 14.5 to let the plane slow down. At some point down the glideslope you will need to put MP back in once the plane has slowed. I use 19” which should give you about 90 kts down the slope with the gear down and half flaps. That makes you a Category B aircraft (9- kts) for approaches. Don’t be afraid to experiment and make your own settings. I use Lean of Peak a lot, you will need different settings if you want to fly ROP. But always full rich when you make full power for takeoff or climb. PS this works at Leadville and will work fine at a 4600 ft. airport.

I don’t have the engine EIS but I have the ADI and there is an auxiliary number. You get to choose one thing to put in that little block and there are lots of choices. I use TAS. That might be the number you are looking for but numbers for the EIS. Should be in the manual.

I make my max TIT 1600. I modify the fuel flow downward slightly if TIT starts to exceed 1600. I usually don’t have to go lower than 10.8 or .9 and most of the time a couple of tenths higher works fine. I don’t obsess about the 1600. If it is sitting at, let’s say, 1606 and is stable there I will leave it, but not if it keeps drifting up. TIT varies quite a bit with OAT where I am. Right now, with temps well below freezing, I couldn’t get TIT to 1600 if I tried hard. Temps are more like 1585. Middle of the summer and higher altitudes is a different deal.

I know its not what you want, but the portable solutions are way cheaper than anything that is installed in the panel and in this case, not just good, but parts of the display through the iPad and Foreflight are better than what is available on the panel. If you are not trying to use the portable as an AHRS there is no need to fasten it down, say with suction cups, which doesn’t work well anyway. I just lay my Stratus on the glare shield just above the charging port, its out of the way. I realize it is potential FOD in the wrong situation, but so is a lot of other stuff I keep in baggage or in the back seat that is not fastened down.

We don’t have a “turbometer,” for example an RPM gauge on the turbo, or any exact measure of the work output by the turbo given that some is wasted through the wastegate. But what I can tell you from observation is that the turbo is not working much if at all during start up or taxi, which for me is about 1100-1200 RPMs and a leaned out fuel flow. One way of knowing this is that the last two cylinders in the induction system barely register after start up and sometimes don’t at all, until I get to the line and do a run up. The JPI does not show temp on cylinders that are less than 240 dF in “Normal” mode. So that tells you that those last cylinders are not getting much air, the turbo is not working very hard. The other way of knowing is that during the takeoff run, when I put in takeoff MP, there is turbo lag and then a distinct power surge of several inches of MP, and that’s when the turbo begins to work. So we don’t really know if the Merlin is causing the turbo to work more or less hard at near idle than the fixed wastegate, but it isn’t working very hard. The fuel flow is only about 3.3 GPH at that point, compared to 22.5-24 on takeoff or 11 GPH in my cruise setting. Remember that how hard the turbo is working is driven in the first place by the pressure in the exhaust system, and there is just not much of that at near idle, so it is to me, sort of academic what the Merlin might or might not be doing at that point.