Jeff_S

I had a 3-blade on my J and it worked fine, but if I were you I'd look into the Hartzell Scimitar 2-blade replacement. I think it looks just as cool, and from a performance perspective they claim it gives roughly the same performance as their old 3-blade STC.

Here's an Ovation 2 AFM that I use when I need to check something quickly. The primary performance difference is going to be on takeoff, as that's about the only place you would use the extra 200 RPMs that the 310hp gives you. So if anything these charts are going to be just a tad conservative. m20rAFM.pdf

If you are planning to fly into Lakeland and park for several days, I don't believe there is an extra parking fee. I've only ever gone down for just a day at a time, and there is no parking fee for that, other than your general admission fee. (Heck, last year when I arrived they were in such a state of confusion that the shuttle tram deposited me at the entrance to the event and I just walked in. No one was even checking for wrist bands. I actually tried to find someplace convenient to pay but none were handy. Sorry, SnF!) If you fly into the outlying airports then you will definitely pay to park. I used Winter Haven one year. The airport was convenient and they had rental cars, but it was a hassle having to drive to the event.

I don't recall ever reading anything here that would dissuade me from purchasing a Mooney. I'm on my second, after all, so the brand must have something that keeps me coming back. I found Mooneyspace before I purchased my J initially. In fact, the first Mooney I seriously considered buying was N205KD which I found here when the owner Brett answered my questions and told me his plane was for sale. He flew it down for me to look at and I really liked it, but we got into a bidding war with another buyer (who is a MS member still, but I haven't seen him active in quite some time) and since it was the only model of Mooney I had examined up close, I decided to let it go. It all worked out in the end, though, because I found N1077G and loved that plane too. I would say that using MS before the purchase certainly helped me know how to ask the right questions and look for the right thing. That may have helped me scope and narrow my choices once the quest began in earnest.

My #5 is also the last to lean, but well within tolerances of LOP operations. And it is not the hottest cylnder, even though no pixies have visited my hangar (that I'm aware of!).

+1 to what Ross said. If they define Max Continuous Power as 65%, then that is entirely consistent with the APS guidelines. But when I first saw the other poster say Max Continuous Power that implied something different to me, e.g. WOT and RPM redline. If you are down low in those conditions, you are definitely greater than 65% power and the red box does exist.

Yes, if you lose contact with ATC, even on flight following, and they can't confirm your location they will typically send someone to look. This happened to me on a flight from Atlanta to Sylva, NC. I was just on flight following, but as I got into the mountains (Sylva is a cool mountaintop strip west of Asheville) we lost communications and radar contact. I just landed, but a few minutes later a Jackson County sheriff pulled up and just wanted to make sure everything was okay.

I can give you a PIREP on Greg Koontz's program. I will try to be fair and balanced, and I don't want to skew Tom's expectations or experience, but maybe this will be helpful. I attended with a buddy back in 2008. I was still flying a Warrior at the time and my buddy had (still has) a C172. Greg's set-up is idyllic, no question. A nice grass runway and a comfortable home with two guest rooms, and he and his wife are very accommodating. At the time, their dog had bad fleas, so if that's still the case keep your distance! (Hey, it is farm country after all.) Greg is also very knowledgeable about aerobatics, and his ground school teaching style makes the concepts clear and easy to understand. My issue came in the flying portions of the class. Here I was, still a fairly "young" pilot with only a few hundred hours under my belt and no experience in a complex airplane, and only a couple of hours in a taildragger. Off we go in his Super Decathlon, and I'm still trying to figure out what the blue knob is for and he's hammering me on "attitude based" flying approach. I quickly got to task saturation and was just trying to keep up. But then the real problem set in when we did the first aileron roll, and I can't blame this on anybody but me...it never even occurred to me that I might get sick. I've never had a motion sickness problem before, and didn't bring anything to deal with it. But that first roll upside down just flipped a bit in my head and I got nauseated immediately. Greg does keep plenty of sick bags so he's prepared for that. On the afternoon hop, we tried a loop, and unfortunately had the same result. Apparently my head just doesn't like to go inverted. So my first day ended with a decision that we would treat this like a tailwheel transition course and just not worry about the aerobatics portion. On the second day we spent a lot of time at the Gadsden airport on ground maneuvers, fast taxiing, learning how to use adverse yaw to help steer, etc. It was all good experience, but I still found Greg's in-plane teaching style to be quite authoritarian and pedantic, throwing things at me faster than I could absorb them and not giving me any real sense of accomplishment. To his credit, Greg did realize that in two short days I wasn't going to surmount my motion sickness problem and made the transition to a different training program so I got some value for what I paid. But for me personally, his in-plane teaching style didn't match up well with my temperament and my general comfort level at that time, and it wasn't clear to me that he adjusted accordingly. It's very possible that were I to go back now, with a lot more flying experience under my belt (and a proactive sickness avoidance strategy), I would have a very different experience. I'll be eager to hear how Tom's works out.

As a relatively new O3 driver my experience may be relevant to you. I flew my J for four years and could comfortably shoe-horn that thing into any tight space I could find. The O has been a learning experience, with its heavier weight and faster speeds. What other posters have said is key...speed control is number one. I also find the O to be much less tolerant of any kind of bounce...with that big weight up front you have to be very careful to keep the nose off, but not TOO high, because it can come down hard and really ruin your day. But I've got 42 hours and 46 landings on it now and it's starting to click. At my home 'drome, taxiway Delta is 2400' from either approach end of the longer runway and the last three times I used that runway I've made the turnoff there without squealing the tires. As to takeoffs, don't give it a second thought. With 310hp that plane leaps off the runway before you even have time to dial in full throttle.

I'd like to say that I prophesied the drop in oil/gas prices and that's what drove me from the J to the Ovation, but that would be a lie. It was all about a primal urge for more nasty, bad-ass speed!

So here's an interesting SB I got from Mooney yesterday. SB-320 says they have discovered that, for G1000 equipped planes, "prolonged engine out flight" can cause the Engine Information page on the MFD to blank out. Don't worry, they say, the page will show back up immediately on engine restart. So the obvious question is, what is "prolonged engine out flight"? How long is "prolonged"? And if your engine is out doesn't that mean you sort of have bigger problems? It's pretty funny, but hey, there is a cut-out set of pages that we need to add to the POH so I suppose it's serious business. (I'm guessing it just relates to running the G1000 on the ground without the engine running, but I just thought the wording was intriguing.)

I have both in the cockpit right now. If you're talking just NEXRAD, then they are similar, although it seems the XM product paints a fuller picture of all the precip, perhaps because it is showing more altitude layers all at the same time. I know that in general, the XM picture is somewhat more dire (read: shows more activity) than the ADS-B picture. I do like the fact that with ADS-B on my iPad I can zoom in closer more quickly to check out the cells. It also depends on where you fly somewhat. Even though the FAA claims there is universal coverage in the lower 48, there still seems to be an ADS-B black hole in the western Tennessee/Eastern Missouri area. I just did a flight from Atlanta to KC for Thanksgiving and there was a good 150 mile stretch in there where ADS-B coverage was absent.

Hello all, I have a friend who lives in Manhattan and his wife has (as a birthday present) has given him carte blanche to start his pilot training. He has no experience or other contacts in the area...just a strong desire. He asked me if I had any recommendations, and while I know nothing of that market, I said I would open the question up to my network. So if you have any flight-school recommendations for someone who lives in Manhattan please let me know. Thanks! Jeff

I have it downloaded from within ForeFlight as part of their documents package. There is no charge for it this way (other than ForeFlight's normal charges). The ForeFlight document review software is pretty good and that way it's part of my flying repertoire.

I think it was just karma getting back at you for being so smug in your choice of cruising altitudes.

What airport? It sounds like it was an uncontrolled field, which means you should have been able to fly any approach you wanted. (I believe that's true even of a controlled field, but it's a bit more problematic.) So if there were other approaches available that would get you down, why did you not just refuse the VOR and take one of them?

This topic is near and dear to my heart...it turns out that I can test this on nearly every takeoff. Something that I discovered after purchasing my O is that the Alternate Air door likes to open on its own accord at full power takeoff in "standard" atmosphere conditions. In other words, when I'm pulling 2700 RPM and maximum MP (like 29" or thereabouts...can't remember what the exact number is) the door opens up. I've had Joey replace the magnets and check everything imaginable, and no one at Mooney or anywhere has ever heard anything like this. We've checked the filter of course. About the only thing we can determine is that it seems even the new stronger magnets aren't putting much hold on the door, as though the door itself has somehow gotten demagnetized. For now I just twist the prop knob back a turn or two on takeoff so I'm only showing 2600 RPM, and if I keep the MP below max the door stays closed. The only other thing we'll try is replacing the door entirely. Once I get airborne and say 1000' AGL (which is 2000' for me) then I can go to max power and the door stays closed. It has something to do with the system pulling max power. I'm open to others' thoughts on this if you've got 'em.

Your questions are nice data points for you to learn, but I wouldn't try to ask them all of the seller. Most of these you should get yourself by looking over the logs first and then formulating questions from what you see. Some may not be relevant. Also, me personally, I don't use feminine pronouns to refer to my airplane...just seems Mooneys are too tough for that!

So, I'm fairly new to the G1000 that I got with the Ovation in July. While it generally works great, I did find (after the fact, unfortunately) that the Range knob on the MFD is non-functional. That is to say, twisting it has no effect on the displayed range on the device. I can push it to activate the cursor and scroll around to select/create waypoints and the like, but I can't zoom in or out on the MFD. It's a minor annoyance because I generally leave it set on Auto Zoom anyway, and I use enough waypoints in a flight plan that I can see far enough out. And I always have the ForeFlight/Stratus 2 system as back up to use for scrolling around to get long range weather, etc. Garmin has a flat $1000 charge to send in the unit for repair, plus the shop time to remove and re-install it. I've decided to wait and see what Mooney comes out with for the WAAS/ADS-B upgrade path before I do anything about it. Other than that, the G1000 has worked great for me and I love it.

I would say SOME planes have active traffic from L3, Avidyne or other, but many have the stock TIS system that relies on transponder output within a TRACON area. That's the boat I'm in, as my traffic doesn't display in rural areas. That's why I was wondering about ADS-B in, mostly for traffic. And it's true I would not give up on the XM weather service as it has more than ADS-B provides.

Yeah, pretty cool. I want me some of those laser safety goggles that one dude was wearing. I suppose, though, that it wouldn't work with painted surfaces because it would repel the paint just like water. That would make all our color schemes obsolete.

José, you obviously missed Stacey Ellis' other post on this same topic, which lays out the schedule. But seriously, I don't understand why you take such a pessimistic view of this. Do you even have a dog in this hunt?

Awesome news, and happy to hear. Just one follow-up question for Stacey & Mooney, though: he specifically said ADS-B Out. I'm curious what, if any, facilities there will be to equip with ADS-B In so that we can have weather and traffic options on the MFD to replace the TIS-B and GDL69. Is that something that Garmin has to address or is it a Mooney issue as well?

Ha! Touché Bob...nicely played. But to be fair, I only called you out on your first error unaided. The second one you were asking for. What can I say, I was a language major in college and do marketing stuff now so spelling just catches my eye. But don't ask me any engineering questions; to me, calculus is that app on my iPhone I use to add up all that money I supposedly have.

To continue in my vein of incredibly helpful additions to this thread, unfortunately Bob, noticeable DOES have an "e"! Also, somewhat in tune with Don Kaye's maxim, I don't think you can have one solid rule for pitch vs. power because it varies by flight regime. The successful pilot has learned how to manipulate both to achieve the desired result.