WardHolbrook

Fuel management in a Mooney is not as big a problem as it is in some aircraft. I've flown some SE Pipers that had 4 fuel tanks and some twin Cessnas that had six tanks and it took a lot of effort and planning not to end up with your fuel reserve split between all those fuel tanks. There is a tendency to get complacent with our fuel management. We don't have to dip into our reserve fuel very often, but when we do, it's frequently during a time of "heightened stress" - you've missed the approach and you've got to divert to your alternate, unforecast winds or weather have played havoc with your estimates, etc. When we need it the most it is also a very busy time in the cockpit, then on top of everything else, you've got to start screwing around with fuel management. It's not too hard to come up with a scenario where you've boxed yourself into a corner and have to switch tanks multiple times during your diversion to the alternate and subsequent approach. Not very good planning. It's obvious why you want your reserve to be in one tank and that's the tank you want to be using during your approach and landing. Things are a little simpler in Mooneys because they only have two tanks, but the same considerations apply.

That's what happens when you don't log off. But if she's married to him I'm sure she must be a saint.

You were in the back. Wait until you have that experience when you're sitting up front. I'm just grateful for TCAS II.

Don't forget the other book I mentioned and the weather training course link that I provided. It's good stuff that any instrument pilot needs to know. I consider them mandatory for any instrument pilot's personal library. I have current editions of both books and still, after 40 years of professional flying, go through them occasionally. Good stuff.

Don't forget that ATC is only required to provide separation from other IFR traffic and VFR traffic separation is on a "workload permitting" basis. Remember that when you're tooling down an airway on an IFR flight plan at 7,000 ft MSL and some VFR guy is coming up that same airway at 6,500 ft MSL. You're both likely to be using GPS so you're both likely to be within just a few feet of airway centerline. Let's all hope that each of you are religiously holding altitude.- plus or minus a couple of hundred feet no longer cuts it out in the real world these days. (Wait until you're flying up in the flight levels and you're going one way one a jet airway and a B747 or A380 comes down the same airway 1000 ft above you. It's an amazing sight - you can't believe how big they appear to be when you're that close! You also come to appreciate the required accuracy of RVSM and the autopilot requirement in RVSM airspace.) The takeaway is EVEN IF you are on an IFR flight plan, IF you are in VMC you much keep your eyeballs outside. This is especially important in marginal VMC.

My thoughts exactly. Might be time to look for a mechanic who is a bit more up to date.

Good stuff. In addition to those two books I recommended, here's another source of great post-checkride training... http://avwxworkshops.com/index_guest.php The important thing to understand is that although you are legal to fly in less than VMC, you're probably not ready to operate in much more than light IFR at this point in time. In Buck's book, he explains one technique to expand and extend your IMC capabilities. Ideally, we'd all have the opportunity to have an experienced and competent instrument pilot at our side for the first 100 hours or so, but that's not the way it works for many of us. Set conservative personal minimums than go about, in a structured manor, to gain the knowledge and understanding to lower them as much as you possible can for they type of flying you do. Perhaps more than any other rating, the instrument is nothing more than a license to learn.

Excellent! Let me make a suggestion - go on Amazon and get two books, Weather Flying by Robert Buck and Instrument Flying by Richard Taylor. Read those books through cover-to-cover a few times. Take notes. Weather Flying will help you understand how to fly weather and Instrument Flying will help you to understand how to work "the system". You can learn this stuff the hard way, by getting a few hundred hours of actual under your belt, or you can learn it the easy way by doing some reading. Your choice.

That's my experience too. It seems to take near Vne airspeeds to get the prop turning again on many of the Lycoming-powered trainers that I've done this exercise in. However, if all else fails, there is always this...

Sounds like a text book example of flying the airplane until it comes to a full and complete stop. In my opinion, too many people have the wrong idea of what constitutes a successful off airport landing. Well done.

Talking about tools in your toolbox, I find this particular app quite interesting. Anyone tried this?

Both Max L/D and Min Sink are actually specific angles of attack, not air speeds. For those of you who have been wise enough to install an AoA indicator the question really is what AoA results in Max L/D and what AoA results in minimum sink? As far as determining what is the minimum sink speed, it's simply a matter of comparing airspeed to rate of descent, but it's typically quite close to stall speed. (Glider pilots get pretty good at flying around at minimum controllable airspeed.) AoA gauges are great tools to have, they are more than expensive stall warning indicators can are useful for more than determining 1.3Vso.

Stopping the prop makes a very significant difference. I have heard that a windmilling propeller has the same drag as a flat plate of the same diameter. Is that true? I don't know, but the difference in drag once the rotation has stopped is quite pronounced. It's something that I demonstrate to all of my students. Remember what they say about tools - having the correct one makes the job easier. I believe that a pilot should have as many tools as possible in his tool box. Not every job you'll be asked to perform in a cockpit can be adequately handled with just a "hammer, screwdriver and a pair of pliers". Stopping the prop isn’t something you’ll always want or need to do in the event of an engine failure. It s only one technique or tool. I'm just glad that I had that particular tool in my tool box that particular day. It came in quite handy. I also don't think this is something that you'll need to "practice". Seeing it demonstrated once is always enough. All you're looking for is to see and experience the difference in drag (descent rate) with the prop stopped and windmilling. Then just file that knowledge and understanding away in your "tool box" and hope the time never comes when you have to draw upon that knowledge. As far as how much does it cost, performance wise, to stop the prop, again from a glider pilot POV, you're only slowing from Max L/D speed to somewhere around minimum sink speed and then accelerating back to L/D max, so the penalty or loss is going to be minimal and as long as you've got some altitude under you, it will make a difference. No one is advocating that this be done in each and every case of an engine failure, but only as a way to add to your engine out glide range. In my case, I was going to get wet so there was nothing to lose. Fortunately, it was all I needed. Like I said, it's just another tool in your pilot toolbox. Remember, when it comes to max L/D, it is actually a specific angle of attack and not a specific airspeed. It is also constant. What varies is the speed at which max L/D is achieved. The heavier you are, the faster you have to fly to achieve it. At lesser weights, it is achieved at slower speeds; but regardless the max L/D is constant. (That's the big reason competition sailplane pilots use water ballast in their gliders - they still have the same glide ratio, but the extra weight allow them to achieve it at a faster speed which gives them better penetration. If soaring conditions deteriorate, all they have to do is jettison the water.) As far as what speed to fly after an engine failure, it may or may not be appropriate to go directly to your actual best glide speed. If you’re directly over your landing spot it might not be necessary. However, I always tell guys that unless they are directly over their landing spot, they need to go for max distance over the ground - you can always loose altitude, but it's impossible to get back once you've given it up. If you’ve got to cover some ground to get to a suitable landing site then you’ll probably want to factor in the winds aloft. If you've got a tail wind then you'll want to fly at a speed that give you maximum endurance (minimum sink) and take advantage of Mother Nature’s push. That speed varies as well, but it is normally close to the stall speed. If you've got a headwind, the speed to fly will be somewhat faster than your best glide speed. The reason for this is simple - let’s say your best glide speed is 100 kias and you're flying into a 100 knot headwind. Although you are at the airplane's most efficient airspeed, you end up descending vertically over a fixed point on the ground - in other words, you're going absolutely nowhere fast. By increasing your airspeed by about 1/2 of the speed of the winds aloft even though you will be descending faster that you would be at your best glide speed, you will at least be making forward progress across the ground. The rule of thumb for this is to add 1/2 of the wind speed to your best glide speed if you're flying into a headwind and decrease 1/2 of the wind speed from your best glide speed if you've got a tailwind. (However, don't fly any slower than your minimum rate of descent IAS.) This may all sound quite complicated, but it’s really straight forward and easy to understand with a little thought and effort. (14 year old kids are legally able to solo gliders and they are quite good at it. This is basic glider stuff.) The payout can be dramatic as it was that afternoon when this stuff kept me from landing in the Great Salt Lake. This is also the reason why I recommend to all of my fixed-wing pilot friends to go spend a little time in a glider. The lessons and skills you will quickly learn transfer readily over to your powered flying and you’ll never know when they will come in quite handy. Like the philosopher said – “Engine? We don’t need no stinking engine!”

Good stuff. I had an engine failure in a Cessna 172 several years ago. I was up with a beginning instrument student doing some basic attitude instrument flying stuff. We had been airborne only about 30 minutes – long enough to depart SLC and head out to the backside of Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake where the designated practice area was located and to begin his training session. We had been flying a racetrack pattern while I was giving him various altitudes, airspeeds and headings to fly. It was about our 2nd or 3rd orbit when all of a sudden I had this feeling that I should vector him tightly around and head back towards the island. All of a sudden the engine quit. Period. No sputtering, no missing, no surging, it just flat stopped running. I immediately took the airplane from the student and ran the engine failure checks, but the engine wasn’t responding. I aimed for the beach and established best glide speed, but it was almost instantly apparent to this glider instructor that we weren’t going to make it and would end up in the salt water off the beach. I then decided that I had nothing to lose so I slow down and got the prop stopped and then went back to best glide speed. That was enough to make the difference and we did make the beach with precious little to spare. To this day, I know that we would have gone into the lake if I wouldn't have got the prop to stop and used all of the glider pilot tricks in my bag. [As it turned out, the engine failure was due to a magneto switch internal failure that caused the engine to stop. On the bright side, I got my first (and only) ride in a Utah Air National Guard Bell Huey helicopter and I learned that if there’s a lot of congestion on the radio frequency, all you have to do is say “May Day” and the frequency becomes yours and yours alone.]

No, you wouldn't need to go to that extreme. I just called one of my buddies who is an AI and bounced this off of him. His response was to try and find the log book entries, but if that failed, he would want to visually inspect the airframe to verify the quality and workmanship and he would also want to see a log book entry showing that the flight controls were balanced. Assuming that it's not a scab job and the flight controls were checked and found to be in balance, he would have no problem signing it off. But again, life would be so much easier with a proper pre-purchase inspection.

Without the appropriate logbook entries there's probably no easy "legal" solution. The airplane has obviously been annualed once or twice since it was last painted so your best bet, under the circumstances, is to simply let sleeping dogs lie. But understand, if an IA ever brings it up, you may to have to do something drastic (strip and repaint) to get the paperwork up to snuff. I do have one additional thought - frequently, log book entries such as this are made on sticky back paper that are meant to be inserted into the logs after the fact. I'd go through any and all the paperwork that you received with the airplane looking for the log book entries. Perhaps the previous owned just slid it in with all of the other paperwork or even stuck it into one of the earlier log books. Stranger things have happened. All of this serves to underscore the importance of a thorough pre-purchase inspection. Good luck.

By any chance is there a decal on the fuselage giving the name of the paint shop? If so, problem solved. Contact them (assuming they're still in business) and have them send you a logbook insert.

Any legitimate paint shop (or aircraft painter) would understand the need (and requirement) to properly document a paint job. Without the appropriate logbook enteries, one would have to question every aspect of the paint job. As I see it, unless you can get those entries, the airplane is unairworthy.

You might be able to glean something from this thread from a few years back... http://mooneyspace.com/topic/3270-the-cafe-measure-of-efficiency-mooney-style/ Personally, I've been known to take that path on occasion, but when all is said and done the old 80/20 rule still applies - you get 80% of the benefit with the first 20% of the effort. The last 20% requires the most of the effort. Any way you slice it, the results are seldom very dramatic and from a practical standpoint any gains can be nullified along the route by a simple ATC vector or request to slow down or speed up. All that being said, it is a fun mental exercise.

I'm not all that familiar with the techniques and equipment used in "paintless" automotive dent repairs. However, I'm a firm believer in the system that is used to repair dings in the slats and leading edges on the stuff I'm flying. That system does not use ball but rather electro-magnetic impulses applied to the exterior of the airframe component to "tap" the dents out and eliminated the need to disassemble the wing or remove the slats. About 7 years ago, the Falcon 50 I was flying was in the shop and one of the mechanics rolling tool carts was accidentally pushed into the leading edge slat. The shop was up front about it, but the ding was beyond limits and a they were facing a huge replacement cost ($125K) to replace the slat. As we were researching our options we came across this approved repair method. I was skeptical at first, but it worked and we were back in the air in a couple of days instead of a couple two or three weeks. It saved them a pile of money and the repair was not detectable. Since that time I have heard of that system being used on light aircraft as well. You're going to have to do your homework to find a shop with the Fluxtronic system, but they are out there.

We used one of the electromagnetic dent removal systems to take out a dent on a leading edge slat on a Falcon 50. Quick, easy and cheap. Check around, you ought to be able to find someone to take care of that for you.

The problem with the leading edge mounted radars is the antenna. When it comes to radar dishes, bigger is better. I'm a believer in onboard wx radar, but if I had a Mooney with one of those installed it would come out at the next available opportunity.

You need to look for the cause of this. It's not normal. Check motor mounts and rigging to start.

The words "stabilized approach" came to my mind when I read this. Seriously. if you're having to slip with full flaps you might want to consider going around and getting set up better. To quote my friends in the barrio, "Tail buffet and possible elevator stall no bueno."

Mooney Twin? Did somebody say Mooney Twin? Here you go... Awwww.... What could have been.