craigsteffen

Yes. I went to the MAPA events for several years, but I never managed to get my Mooney there (I was close one time but had to drive in in a rental due to weather). The airport is a great venue, the factory is great to see and tour. You could set it up for the fall, and have flyers at Oshkosh this year.

Yes. Direct web stores aren't hard or expensive to set up. You could also set up a wishlist tool on your web site for people to put in requests, and then you could list the currently outstanding requests, so that people could add theirs to the list.

Hi Jonny, I sold my Mooney last September, so I'm not directly effected by this any more, but since you specifically asked for our input, here's my take as a very loyal Mooney owner from 2012 to 2021. The Mooney aircraft generally were superbly engineered, fly beautifully when maintained, and have a very high level of support and loyalty from owners and pilots. However, the several years when it was difficult and slow to get parts have started to erode that affection. To keep Mooney healthy as a company, and as a brand, I think you and the company need to understand that your biggest asset are the owners and pilots, and the aircraft that remain flying. The company has neglected that asset very badly over the last several years, and you are going to have to invest time to build it back up if you're going to survive long-term. Short-term parts orders are a very key part of this, but you know about that. It took six months for me to get a new trim system, and that 8-month annual wasn't the *only* reason I sold my plane, but it was a big one. After you get parts flowing, I think the biggest hole you have is a lot of Mooneys are IFR-legal but it's just so expensive/complicated to get them with modern avionics, including autopilot. Up until very recently, there wasn't really any option less than $30k for an autopilot that was worth having. Now there is, or almost is. I think it would be smart to work deals with vendors to create a streamlined, factory-installed modernization program to take the old Mooneys that fly well but don't have upgraded avionics, to bring them all up to snuff in one step. My druthers would be to have Aspen+Avidyne+Stratus+TruTrak, but I imagine corporate-wise, it would make sense to go all-Garmin (barf). In either case, if you had a factory-approved setup that you could install all at once, you could offer discounts because of scale, and it would be guaranteed to work because it would be the same setup in every plane, and it wouldn't fall on individual avionics shops to work out all the individual kinks. If you did something like this, suddenly the fleet wouldn't be divided between old-but-barely-capable and nice-but-too-expensive. Doing something like this would make a steady stream of people bringing you their planes for upgrades. One other major reason that I sold my Mooney was that I just couldn't get an autopilot for it, short of spending as much as a new engine. Trutrak dragged their feet for four years for Mooney certification (which may be in place now, I can't tell). Good luck. I hope you and the company can make a run of it this time. But understand--if you concentrate on selling new planes, you will fail. It will take too much time to build up to sustainable. Concentrate on the existing fleet that love the planes, get those airframes taken care of (and upgraded even!) and only THEN make the move to spin up new stock. I look forward to stopping by the Mooney booth at Oshkosh this year. If you sat around and talked to owners and pilots yourself, that would be a fantastic gesture. (I have a youtube channel, that among other things has featured me flying my Mooney. If you have things to announce, or if you have a booth at Oshkosh that's worth seeing, I'd love to feature it on my channel. "Figuring stuff out dot net". Search for "Mooney IFR Airventure departure" and my first video comes up.) Craig Steffen

I'd just like to add a bit of information I've discovered about my 1967 M20F. My information is specifically for the planes with the 2x3 engine gauge cluster in the lower left co-pilot panel, but may apply to other configurations as well with resistive fuel gauges. This is particularly true for people with gauges that read sometimes right but sometimes wrong, or particularly when the gauges bounce from indicating empty to a reasonable value and back again. In mine, the oil pressure is direct-read mechanical. CHT and oil temp take supply voltage and ground through the sensor. The ammeter of course isn't grounded at all. And because of their electrical design, the fuel gauges ground through the senders...AND also through the ground point in the gauge cluster itself. The ground point in the gauge cluster takes its ground from a fairly short pigtail that comes out of the canon plug on the back...and screws into the frame member at the bottom of the instrument panel with a single screw. It is a TERRIBLE, not to mention INTERMITTENT ground point. When we were investigating this, I finally realized that with the electrical master on, if I wiggled the little piece of sheet metal that the gauge grounding screw goes through, the fuel gauge needles would flop up and down in rhythm with my wiggling it. So now that ground point has another wire that runs up into the power wiring behind the right side of the panel and attaches to a known good ground point that actually has good contact with the frame. So if your fuel gauges act like this (and reading back through this thread, I'd guess at least half of these folks are exhibiting suspiciously similar symptoms to what I used to have) then I'd electrically check the place where the gauge itself grounds to the plane, and make sure that's solid, and if it's not, connect to a good electrical ground.

Thank you for the report. It *is* useful to hear what shops are being told. And believe me, us Mooney owners are interested and cautiously interested. But understand that Bendix/King for the last year and change and TruTrak for at least two years before that have been completely unwavering in stating "we almost have it certified; it will be available in six months". They would say that no matter what. They said it in these forums, and I have chains of emails of the same claims. So yes, I'm hopeful too, but I'm going to stay jaded until I hear the words "available for order, what's your model and serial number?". The only reason I'm not completely angry and disillusioned is that the story *sort of* changed a bit when BK took over the product. When I talked to Bendix-King last fall, they said they were deciding between Mooneys and some other model to pursue pursue certification for internally. Once I got over my rage about realizing that TruTrak was basically flat-out lying the whole time, I realized that possibly this was different in that they were telling me slightly real (if incomplete) information. Later in the winter, I talked to them again, and they said that the Mooney certification had actually be contracted out to an external company and they expected it would take six months, and it would be "done" round about June. I talked to them earlier this spring, and targetting in June hadn't changed. Now if I talked to them at Oshkosh at they say "we'll have it in six months" I'm going to be sad and angry all over again. Let's also be very careful and understand that finishing the paperwork is not the only thing that has to happen. They have to be able to produce product. There's a video by "Jimmy's world" on YouTube about him waiting for months for an AeroCruze (for an airframe that it's already certified for) and not being able the get it because it wasn't available. So I think questions we need to ask of Bendix-King (and any manufacturer of a new thing) are: "How long do you expect the STC to take from right now?" "What are the steps that need to happen between that and having availability of actual certified airframe-specific install kits?" Finally: "From the point that you deliver the first install kit, how long will it take at your current unit production rate to fulfill all of the back-orders for that product so that the kits will start to be immediately available?" If someone can answer those questions with a straight face and more detail than "it'll be available in six months" maybe I'll hold out a bit of hope.

@Alan Fox Sorry I haven't called. It turns out I was after all able to order the landing gear part that I needed. After my annual is done, though, may ping you again about the price for your gear, if it is the same as used in my 1967 F model.

Definitely hang on to them. They're used to check the gear pre-load at annual and at 100-hour inspections.

Hey, welcome to the club! We can take this discussion elsewhere, but in short, the two smaller pieces are used to check the gear preload every annual. The square holes are size for a torque wrench. The bigger ones are only used to replace the gear shock pucks. Hopefully you only need that every 10 years or so. You should have a general idea how close you are to replacement by looking at the date code on the pucks--but presumably you have that knowledge from your pre-buy inspection.

Never mind. Damn and blast. I now see there's an eBay auction with this same photo that sold recently. I totally would have bought them if I'd seen it. I had a busy couple of weeks getting ready for a conference and wasn't checking my eBay alerts. *sigh*

There are four pieces pictured. The two larger ones with the screws are compression tools for replacing pucks. The two smaller ones, just solid pieces of metal, are for checking the gear rigging preload with a torque wrench.

Wait, you sold *yours* or someone else sold a set? Are these still available or not?

Do you have the main gear? Price for one or both main gear? Price for nose gear as long as we're on the subject?

Thanks everyone. I'll definitely checkout AGL at some point.

Is this still available?

I get completely confused as to which model of the Aspen is which. Is this the model with CDI bars for both navigation and glideslope on it, or not? And does the HSI section display map segments on, say, any approach, or just the current leg that you're on? Is this new or has it been installed in an aircraft before? (If the latter, I'm wondering about the STC legalities of buying and installing it.) Thanks for any info.