DaV8or

The question is, why? Why do you want to rebuild these planes? Vintage Mooney prices have been super low now for years. They are priced this way because there is more supply than demand. Resurrecting more old Mooneys just makes it worse. I see no increase in demand any time soon myself. We should just appreciate these old Mooneys for what they really are- an inexpensive reserve supply of affordable replacement parts to keep the active fleet active.

Back to the topic... I don't know about TKS fluid, I have no idea where that stuff comes from, but in the case of oil, I found a distributor for Phillips that is just 50 miles away, so I go there and buy "direct" from the distributor by the case. The price is still retail, but very close to the best deals you can find on the internet and no shipping costs since I go to pick it up. Because I drive an electric car, the out of pocket cost to go and get it is very reasonable. Of course it does cost me hours of my time, but I try to combine it with other reasons to be in the Bay Area. Just an idea. A little Google fu and you may be able to find a distributor near you.

Congratulations on your new F!! Looks a lot like mine... only way better. I always wondered what my plane might look like with shiny new paint on it!

Seriously, it's not a "liberal" thing. Follow the money. It's a money thing. Don't act like California is the only place in the country where airfields are under attack. They have closed plenty all around the country and for the exact same supposed reasons of safety, noise and environmental damage. At VNY and SMO it's all about very valuable real estate. You know, good old fashioned right wing values of "free markets", greed and capitalism.

I'll just post what I put on another forum- At least it was likely painless and he didn't take anyone with him. Rich people with sports injuries are likely no stranger to these drugs. I am super thankful that he didn't ask someone to go along with him.

-"A heater in the cockpit used to keep electronics warm in cold weather is being considered as the possible cause."- What is this heater and why do you need it? I don't have one. The guy is in Petaluma, CA. We don't really have cold weather. This plane hasn't recently been for sale has it?

It's for manual gear only. If you have electric gear you just measure. I have electric gear and a useless to me nose gear tool I wish I could use instead. I hate the measuring procedure.

Agreed. Sadly, some people only react to peer pressure and public shaming.

Why do we need 200 mph trains?? We have 500 mph sky trains. As cramped and terrible as the sky trains are, I still much prefer to get where I'm going much faster.

At my age, definitely mirror under the Mooney.

Wow. A lot of high horses around here. I bet every single one of us participating in this thread watched that video in it's entirety at least once. Some of you more than once. Who's the sick voyeur again? We all knew before we clicked on the play button that Roy was dead. Why did we watch it then? Once there was no more flying in the video and it was all cussing by the four letter bro, how many of you then turned it off? I bet none. We all wanted to see the sorry wreck. What in the world were we hoping to "learn" from this video?? It's great to know that we have so many natural born 1st responders around here. You guys would have been like a school of piranha swarming that wreck to find the dead body. Look at that wreck. You know he was dead. The thing is, the rest of humanity is not like you guys and it never was. It's not a failure of society, or just the horrible people of today, it's always been this way. Psychologists have studied this phenomenon and it turns out a small percentage of us will run into a burning building, no questions asked, but the larger majority of us will not. Again, this is a human variation thing, not a societal thing. Face it, YouTube videos like this is where we get our news footage now. In the past, they used to pay professionals to rush to the scene of a crash to film/tape footage of a crash so that we could watch it at home. Now they just don't have to keep a guy on staff so much. During the burning of the Hindenburg footage we have all seen, did any of you criticize the camera man and reporter for not throwing down the camera and microphone and rushing to help the victims of that tragedy? At least in the case of the Hindenburg, there were survivors and some can be seen jumping from the burning craft. Other than the cussing and mindless blather, there is little difference between the coverage of the Hindenburg and coverage of the Icon crash. In fact, we should all be thanking the Bro. Without his video, this thread likely would never have been posted and we would have missed out on all this entertainment.

I am in the middle of annual right now and plan to replace these rings. I was going to buy the same ol' from Spruce, but these look good. How do I know which cap I have? Is it marked underneath? Sorry, I'm lazy and haven't gone over to the hangar yet.

That's the big plan. Make it hard for people to get here and then maybe we can stop the hoards of people from moving here. Then the prices of everything will start to come down... hopefully.

Actually, some of the early Mooneys are zinc chromated, mine is. I also thought the factory has returned to this practice at some point, has it not?

Good question and a difficult one to answer. I believe that last year just over 1000 new, certified piston aircraft were sold from all brands including LSA. I'm not sure how to find out how many new flying E/AB planes became operational in 2016.

See, your story right there about the P-39 illustrates what could happen eventually to some of these Mooneys. In the early '60s that P-39 was nearly worthless. At that time flying P-51s were available pretty cheap, why would you want a second rate fighter? The cost was too high. In time however, as demand for all things WWII grew, suddenly the value of that P-39 grew to where it was worth spending the money to fix it up and fly it again. These old Mooneys might become more desirable one day too, but for that to happen either there needs to be more pilots an therefore airplanes, or there needs to be less flyable airplanes available, or there needs to a change in the economics of fixing up old airplanes. I don't see any indications that becoming a pilot is going to be the new in thing, or fad, (except maybe in China) so the first is not likely. The second is slowly happening. Accidents, mother nature and economic hardships are causing more and more planes to fall off the registry faster than they are replaced. If this trend continues, eventually these "reserve" planes might actually become valuable enough to be fixed in some cases. The third case would require a huge shift in the regulations regarding certified airplanes. If there were to be a way to turn these certified planes into experimentals that could flown under the same regs as the E/AB category, I can see some of these derelicts becoming viable projects for the kind of people that like projects. It's not likely to happen, but it might. One never knows.

I don't use the flaps or the gear handle. If you leave the flaps up, you never have to think about them. Same goes for the gear and the added benefit is, you'll never have a gear up landing. The red and blue knobs are annoying too. I leave those all the way forward. Nothing good can come from them. My car has a throttle and a brake. That's all my airplane needs too. I've heard about cowl flaps, but I haven't found them yet. It's not cabin air is it? Anyhow, I don't see the point. Why would the cowl need more lift? Do they help you go up faster? Is that how you land in a nose high attitude, with full cowl flaps? Seriously, too much work. If it gets off the ground and flies with just the throttle, why complicate things?

At least it sounded like it had interesting adventures before retirement.

Don't we have some Sacramento, CA members? I know there's some dead Mooneys up at Sacramento Executive rotting under those covered tie downs and also on exposed tie downs.

I have similar experiences. I grew up in Santa Barbara, CA and back then if you traveled north on the 101, you would pass through the village of Gaviota and there they had a schoolhouse called Vista Del Mar Union School and on the grounds was a North American F-86 Saber. It had it's engine, guns, avionics, etc removed, but you could climb on it and there was a way to climb into where the engine was and make you way to the cockpit. Every time my family took a day trip north, we would stop in Gaviota. The Schoolhouse is visible from the 101 freeway and so was the Saber. The school closed in 1986 and the Saber soon thereafter disappeared, but I still look over there when I pass by today and think about it. Also when I was a kid and in the Boy Scouts, our troop arranged to go camping in the desert at Edwards Air Force Base. This was the '70s and you could still do cool things like that. One of two things that really stand out from that trip, was hiking to see the rocket sled track where they did all those experiments to do with humans and G forces that everyone, including me at the time, had seen those black and white films. We went down in the concrete bunker where they ran the experiments and looked out through the thick, blast proof glass. You don't forget this stuff. The other was hiking over a hill and coming across a B-58 Hustler in the desert. As we got closer, we realized that it had been torn to sheds with bullet holes. It was clear it was a ground attack practice target. It had lots of sharp, jagged edges sticking out, but did that stop us? No. We climbed all over and in that thing. It was so cool and it was one of my favorite planes at the time as I had just finished a model of one. We were kids, so it never occurred to us that they might come back and shoot at it again while we were there. It was an adventure... Anyhow, those were the days.

It is too bad that a bunch of these derelict airplanes (not just Mooneys) couldn't be rounded up and made into a playground area for kids at the airport. I would have loved that as a kid. I suppose liability, lawyers, insurance, etc...

I like the auxiliary fuel tank. Seems like something's missing though...

As bad as they have it, it's no where near as bad as the forgotten and neglected Americans living in Puerto Rico right now. Those poor folks have little food, no electricity, no clean water, no sanitation, no homes and of course no money. They will soon start getting ill from disease as if it weren't bad enough. Those are the people hurting in America right now.

Oh that is a swindle!! Seems like somebody has some slpainin' to do.

I forget. I know you said somewhere before, but why didn't you move the plane again?