bradp

My two year old had her birthday yesterday so we had family engagements, but it sounds like it was fun - and what a great fall flying day yesterday. -B Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Wow looks great. Can you send a zoomed out picture too... Would be nice to see how it improves the lines of the aircraft. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I've found in conditions where wind is gusty and from varying and unpredictable direction, I've gotten into an uncomfortable feeling of cartwheeling if a direct crosswind becomes a quartering tailwind down the runway. Just be ready to reverse your nose down pressure at a moments nose-tice. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Ha. I had the opposite experience at Princeton. Don't be the C172 that assumes the Mooney in front of you has a jet like approach speed and rollout and then tailgate on short final so that your wheels are touching down as said Mooney is just exiting the midfield taxiway. By the way Cessna 172, in your effort to ride the a$$ of the mooney, you blew by the midfield turnoff. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I would like to clarify a couple of things about the post above questioning the utility of a pulse oximiter at altitude. 1. There is no lag between central oxygenation and cerebral oxygenation except for the cardiac output that is diverted to the brain, heart and other high-oxygen consuming organs in states of cardiovascular stress. In a person with a normal heart (i.e. you have a third class medical and were not a blue baby as an infant) there is perfect mixing of oxygenated blood as it leaves the heart. The body doesn't get to decide that it is sending more oxygenated blood to the brain, but it does have a mechanism to preserve cardiac output to the brain (see #2, below). 2. If you are peripherally vasoconstricted for reason number (1), above, or another reason, like your cabin heat is off and you're going all Memphis Bell in the flight levels with Piloto's bomber jacket and no gloves, you will either get intermittent readings or will be unable to get a reading on your pulse oximeter. They may be unreliable, but they will mostly be unreliable by showing a low value or no value. For this reason I recommend one with a pulse waveform (what we call a pleth waveform) - it will give you an idea of the quality of the measurement at any given time. Carl is correct that muscle movement can affect a pulse ox reading negatively. 3. The time it takes for a red blood cell to get from the venous circulation to the arterial circulation is pretty low - and importantly less than the time of useful consciousness in the flight levels. 4. The brain cares about oxygen delivery to tissues. For the math/medicine nerds in the group, Delivery of O2 to the tissues (DO2) is: DO2 = cardiac output * oxygen content per mL of blood DO2 = cardiac ouput * [((SaO2%/100)*1.34*Hemoglobin concentration) + 0.003*PaO2)] As you can see the real driver for oxygen content is how much hemoglobin is bound to oxygen. The pressure of oxygen in the gas exchange parts of the lung drives how much oxygen is bound to hemoglobin. Lance Armstrong might do 30 sec better in the flight levels because he drove up his hemoglobin levels (cheating bastard). 5. As alluded to previously, the reason you feel air hungry when you hold your breath is mostly due to the buildup of carbon dioxide in your blood. People don't become nearly as air hungry with hypoxia - in fact with a normal carbon dioxide level (which will not be impaired in the flight levels) and a normal blood pH you can go on happy as a clam without feeling any need to breathe - ask the folks who have been to the altitude chamber. 6. The reason your oxygen saturations can last longer at seal level with holding your breath is as follows: When I want to keep someone's oxygen saturations up for as long as I can when I am going to make them apneic on purpose is doing something called pre-oxygenation. I do this when I place a breathing tube in someone. Pretty much I try to let them breathe 100% oxygen at Sea Level for a period of time. The purpose of this is to essentially wash out the 70 odd percent atmospheric nitrogen that out lungs are filled with with 100% oxygen. An adult with normal lungs can last with a normal oxygen saturation for between 3 and 10 minutes completely apneic with this method. That's a really long time in my book. The reason is that you create a reserve by which oxygen delivery across the lung can occur. You still build up CO2 over time, but this is a remarkably useful procedure. I take care of infants and children, which have much less of a lung functional volume, a higher heart rate and higher tissue oxygen consumption, so instead of getting 3 minutes, I get 30 seconds-1 min of time to do what I need to do before they start dropping oxygen saturation levels. When you take a deep breath in and hold your breath, you are doing something similar but instead of filling the lungs with 100% oxygen you're starting out with 21%. It's somewhat but not very useful to try to hyperventilate to wash out carbon dioxide from the lung prior to holding your breath - this is what those deep sea free divers do. Your ability to hold your breath and maintain normal saturations will necessarily be less than if you pre-oxygenated with 100% oxygen. Now lets do the same thing in the flight levels. You are entraining your lung with a lower total pressure of gas even if it's 100% (via a perfectly working non-rebreathing mask). Cool. Can you hold your breath for a time longer than at sea level with 21% oxygen? Nope. Why? Because the partial pressure of the 100% oxygen is still low because the atmospheric pressure is 400 mmHg instead of 760 mmHg. You fill the alveoli with less pressure of oxygen (even though it's 100%) and you have fewer oxygen molecules per volume unit of alveoli. Less driving pressure to get oxygen across the lung and bound to hemoglobin in the blood. This also shows why it's really dangerous to use a nasal cannula in the flight levels - with that you are replacing 21% oxygen with 35% oxygen and a coordinate decrease in the percentage of nitrogen. The atmospheric pressure is still what it is (Mt. Everest). However, you just took what little ability to sustain a pre-oxygenation reserve and cut it significantly. Having a small reserve may not mean much in terms of time (20-30 sec? Maybe...), but that 30 seconds of useful consciousness may be the difference between reaching for the backup oxygen bottle and not making it. So please use a mask setup as per the regs if traveling in the FLs. What does the body do when oxygen sats are lower? What it can... namely your heart rate will increase to increase cardiac output and via that oxygen delivery equation get more ml/min of oxygenated blood to the brain and the heart. You'll also breathe faster (you have both carbon dioxide measuring apparatus in your brain and you can sense hypoxia even though you don't feel as "air hungry" when hypoxic), and you'll divert blood from muscles and gut to brain and heart. The brain is good at extracting every bit of oxygen it can your the saturation of blood that returns to your heart (the mixed venous oxygen saturation) will be lower. I think Carl was describing this phenomenon of diverting useful cardiac output and increasing oxygen extraction in his post, above, but it should be recognized that a mechanism to achieve this is peripheral vasoconstriction and that should be reflected in the quality of the pulse-saturation waveform. Long winded, but in summary a pulse-oximeter should be used on flights above (pick your altitude - depending on your lung health, age, personal reaction to altitude) 8,000 ft, 10,000 ft 12,500 ft.... I don't know the answer but that's for each of us to determine for ourselves. Please use a pulse ox with the caveat that they are incredibly useful but not perfect almost real time measurements of what your oxygenation level is. If you are feeling symptomatic and the pulse ox is saying 100% something may be wrong... use your backup oxygen and consider the possibility of carbon monoxide poisoning. If you feel symptomatic and you're not sure if something is or what's wrong quickly get to a lower altitude now and then figure out your situation once your time of useful consciousness has been addressed. Stay safe up there... - Brad (my IRL credentials are Pediatric Critical Care Medicine Doc, Aeromedical Transport Doc, PhD in Molecular Physiology) (@ Carl on the side - check your averaging for your pulse ox - in peds we keep the averaging super short, the delay you see may be a reflection of the averaging).

All pulse oximetry use the same technology. The variation comes in the quality of the light sensor, light filtration outside the wavelengths of interest and the processing algorithm to tell what's junk and what's real. All pulse oximetry reliability declines with lower saturation. Even the fancy $1000+ oximeters I use at work aren't reliable below about 70%. One more thing to remember is that carbon monoxide can cause a falsely high pule oximetry reading. That is because carbon monoxide binds to hemoglobin and makes it for all intents and purposes look like red blood to the oximeter. Thus the cherry red skin in Caucasian folks you hear about with carbon monoxide poisoning. An unpressurized aircraft with a minus whatever really cold outside air temperature will invariably be using cabin heat. Please invest in a carbon monoxide detection system (they're cheap). It's just as important as a pulse ox. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Density altitude affects the alveolar gas equation (what determines the level or more accurately the partial pressure) of oxygen in the gas exchange parts of your lungs. The more water vapor the higher the density altitude and and lower partial pressure of oxygen. Partial pressure is what drives oxygenation. However this is moot in the very dry environment of breathing oxygen via mask or ambient air in the flight levels. The reason I asked about pulse oximetry is that spot checks are not the ideal way to monitor ... Continuous oximetry is. Don't get me wrong, spot checks are 1000x better than no oximetry at all, but not as useful as trending and being able to set an alarm at a predefined value (probably 94% as a lower limit in someone with baseline healthy lungs) BEFORE the insidious symptoms of hypoxia set in. For those who have altitude chamber experience, you might be a bit safer with intermittent checks, but symptoms can vary with things like age (alt chamber in your 20s may not be the same as when you're 50), fatigue, hydration status, etc. The other factor I'd like the group to consider is that the maximal Percent of oxygen that you will get with a nasal cannula setup regardless of whether it has a nerdy looking reservoir thingy is about 30-35% because you are entraining ambient air along with it even if you jack up the flow rate to 4 or 6 liters per minute. With a simple face mask at 6-8 liters per minute you can expect between 40-60% oxygen that you breathe. A non re breathing face mask (the kind with the bag similar to the principle that the fancy airliner masks use) can provide about 85-95% oxygen I ideal conditions using between 10-15 liters per minute of pure oxygen. What does this mean in real life? Well using the gas equation, and a nasal cannula at FL240 with about 400 mmHg standard atmosphere and assuming no water vapor, you can expect an alveolar oxygen pressure of 70 which equates to an oxygen sat of somewhere near 90-92%. Using a simple face mask you start out with an alveolar pressure of 150 and that equates to an oxygen sat of 99%. A non rebreather mask wouldn't help the saturation much more but they would give you a longer reserve should your oxygen apparatus quit functioning. In that situation you'd start out with an alveolar oxygen pressure of 350. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

For some reason on the tapatalk app I am starting to get ghost messages in my inbox - inbox count saying "2" but nothing unread. I'm going to file a bug report with them. Any update on the sub forums issue? Thanks -Brad

For the pilots who fly in the flight levels unpressurized I have a question about your pulse oximetry setups. Most of those I find on spruce etc seem like simple setups. Do you constantly monitor or just sport check? Does the monitor run of batteries or ships power or both? Do you have an alarm set? If so at what % SpO2? I'm curious to understand the monitoring that is involved If flying the flight levels. Thanks Brad Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

So the good news is that there was as Cody and others alluded to a small speck of grease that had pooped itself out. Not sure how long it was there but worked its way from the inside of the spinner and $hat itself across the blades. Cleaned it up, ran it up. Clean. Test flew and clean again. Flew back home 2hrs this morning and still clean. I'm going to have the prop resealed when the plane goes in for hail repair and repaint this winter. Thank you all for your help in dealing with this. It's unbelievable what a helpful and accommodating Internet community we have. I got PMs with cell phones from members offering any assistance if needed / stuck. You are great resources and I learn a ton every time I post a question. Take care, Brad Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

For those who know the systems well is water contamination a possibility? FLs and pressure differential across the regulator can lead to ice quickly.

Right now at 39N Princeton Airpark. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Ok thank you Clarence. It's only the Hartzels that have greasing provisions then?. Should I be looking for a bad seal then - blade or crank case? Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Hi all I'm looking for some help/advice. Flew from Pittsburgh to NJ today. The plane is about 10 hrs out of annual and I noted what I initially thought was bugs but on inspection it looked more like grease. No sign of oil anywhere. I cleaned it off ran it up, cycled the prop, and took it around the pattern. Noted a definite pattern of grease on the prop blades. I took some photos but because of the sun needed to doctor them significantly to make the pattern show. Tomorrow I'm going to pull the spinner and cowl and thoroughly inspect. The crank case seal was replaced about 25 hrs ago. I don't have the prop log with me so I don't know if grease was injected or not as part of the annual. The plane has (finally) otherwise been performing flawlessly. Ill need to make a determination tomorrow whether this is an airworthiness issue or not. I'm thinking if I'm thoroughly convinced it's from injection of grease, I'll fly her home. If I'm not convinced I'll drive the family home and get the plane to Senisech. Thanks for your advice and take care b

I regularly use flight watch to give PIREPS when I see a deviation from something that is predicted or reported. Nothing better than a set of eyes to tell you what is acutely happening. However, I would less often use it to get weather information. Especially with the advent of XM, and now ADS-B my asking for information will become less and less. That said, it was nice having a quick answer and the lack of folks getting full briefings and other services with the dedicated Wx frequency. I'll have to see how many PIREPS I give now when I'll certainly be irking to get back on with App or CTR or whichever ATC I happen to be leaving the frequency for to talk to FSS. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Here are some pictures of my new setup for a full sized iPad. I flew with it the first time without all the parts having arrived yesterday (was missing he iPad cradle), but will seem to fit and most importantly it does not interfere with full travel of the yoke. I am also able to mount the iPad in a horizontal position, which I prefer for SV on forelflight next to a moving map. The parts are the ratcheting swivel arm and small claw clamp from RAM. Seems sturdy. Will fly with the full setup and update after the weekend Take care Brad. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Mobile interface is really clean and apparently easy to use if this post goes through. -B

I have no direct experience with them but I'd look into Winchester Aero, (Winchester VA) everything I've read in every thread about them seems to be positive. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

And do everything you can not to be the crew of this plane. http://www.pilotsofamerica.com/forum/showthread.php?t=85332 ... But learn from them Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Spaghetti factory. Not Sausage factory. :-) Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I spoke with the insurance claims adjustor yesterday, and they have proposed the following. They offered to cover 100% of the $12,500 estimate for control surface reskinning, balancing and re-rigging They offered to cover 100% of the approximately $5,000 for body work They offered to cover 80% of the $12,5000 estimate for repainting I queried the 80% (as any CB worth his salt should) and he said that he would need to make an effort to factor depreciation of the current (probably original - but I'm looking into that) paint job and I should be happy that I'm getting a new paint job. My thoughts are 1) I wasn't looking for a paint job now - nor was I in need of one. Maybe touch up on the wings for <1 AMU, but I'd rather put that 2.5 AMU into a better paint job or some other upgrade to the bird rather than just making it cheaper for my insurance carrier. 2) Depreciation argument doesn't seem valid from an insurance standpoint. i.e. for my homeowners insurance if a tree fell on my house and I was in need of a new roof, the roof would be replaced. I wouldn't be told that the depreciated value of the roof would dictate that I would be due for a new roof soon anyway and I should pay co-insurance. In addition I'll take some sort of a hit (if) I decide to sell (at some point in the distant future). My plan is: 1) Outline my thoughts in a letter to the insurance adjustor 2) Enlist my insurance broker (who's very helpful) to try to sway the insurance carrier. My questions for the group are: 1) For those of you who have dealt with hail or other insurance claims in the past, how did you deal with the back and forth? Is this something common? 2) Does their depreciation argument have any merit whatsoever? As always, thanks for your help and take care, Brad

Thanks for the advice everyone. I think that I need to download the data off the EDM as this video shows the gami spread tight but cyl 1 is definitely running a bit richer than everyone else. I was running LOP fine at 6500 ft and during descent. Just something different I've noticed since having induction / exhaust leaks repaired. https://youtu.be/yVzfnU3swgY I'll post a comparison video if I (ehem) have some injectors swapped. Just to confirm proper torque value is 60-in lbs from the lycoming cleaning injector SI. However there seems to be some variances regarding whether to rotate the "a" stamp downward depending on the part number of the injector. LW-18265 appears to be the correct part number - 60 in lbs plus up to 180-deg rotation. Thanks - Brad Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I'm flying again today so I'll get a bit more information. However, I was going about as slow as I could go with the quadrant type mixture control. Given this limitation I was seeing all 4 cylinders peaking at what surprised me to be almost exactly the same time. I agree it suggests 1 is a lot richer than the other cylinders. I'll see if I can get a video. -B Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I didn't want to title this another LOP question, but that's kind of what it is. Ran LOP today with a gami spread of as close to zero as possible without a vernier type throttle. However, as the picture explains, the a/f ratio ceases to be matched as I continue to lean. The plane just came back from annual and I had an exhaust leak repaired and an induction leak repaired (on two different cylinders). I'm thinking that I just need to rotate the stock fuel injectors , but I was a little curious about this effect and wanted to get the group opinion. Also one more reason I want to get my hail pocked DeeDee fixed up. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I'll try not to invest too much effort to this thread as it has also devolved but here's my opinion. Transition training is recommended. It's a check out. It's designed to get you safe. You can take this as a license to learn and finish with a certificate, bachelors, masters, or PhD in Mooney operation. You may decide that you need a Mooney-Yoda or you will be a self taught Jedi . Either way self assessment of your own capabilities and conditions, while establishing some practical limitations is paramount. Do you need to fly 2000 miles to see Don to get proficient ? Maybe but not necessarily. For me it was a checkout with the instructor that instructed the previous owner. Flew for 5 hrs and then I felt comfortable in the plane. Comfortable enough to to embark on a cross country journey from Fresno to Boston including taking passengers after insurance said I could. I was also flying a lot and instrument proficient in an Arrow at the time. The transition training was straightforward. Was this a good idea? Absolutely but it involved risk management decisions and consistent self assessment. Why? Because I value my own behind and that of my wife, family, etc. Honestly the Mooney has quirks and deserves the same respect as any other new or unfamiliar aircraft. No more and no less. Learn to fly it safely in whatever way you define safely. Just be responsible about it. Also there seems to be an over emphasis on landing technique in the mooney where the transition training conversation should also focus on things that will actually get you killed like not knowing how to perform emergency procedures including gear down, "power off" performance characteristics, and especially avoidance of spins. I believe it was the base to final spin accident rate that drove Cirrus-specific training by comparison. Brad Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk