Becca

We’ve been flying to Oshkosh for 15 years. There’s been 0 midair’s at Fisk in that time - and far more planes arrive via Fisk than in group arrivals. There’s lots of advantages to the various mass arrivals, such as the friendships, Mooney community, and, in recent years, the preferred parking in N40 (which used to be strictly first come first serve). But for many reasons various people cannot participate in the mass arrivals due to timing and other reasons, and that should not deter fly-in attendance - it is wrong to suggest that Fisk is less safe than a mass arrival. Frankly, any pilot who cannot control their airspeed and stay 1 mile in trail in another plane as required to safely fly the Fisk arrival, has no business flying in formation in a mass arrival.

There are trophies for 2nd and 3rd :). Where are you located? The AVC can be done in a weekend (arrive Saturday, leave Sunday after the race). No need to wait for retirement!!

Can you email me the full resolution? Those are awesome!

It’s fair to round that up to 191 mph right?

We competed in our 7th (I think) AirVenture Cup this year. This is an annual air race that is held the weekend before Oshkosh. This is grass roots air racing - not Reno - sort of like a 10k of air racing. The basic idea is you fly a ~350-400 nmi cross country course, and the fastest race in your category wins. This was the largest field racing yet - over 100 airplanes. Sadly, only 3 Mooneys (2 M20J's in the FAC3RG class). I think I can speak for the 3 Mooneys out there - we would LOVE to see more head-to-head Mooney competition. If they have 5 airplanes of the same type we can get our own class and our own trophy. Consider coming out and racing next year. If you're thinking about it, let me know, and maybe we can get the right number to have our own class! (Another benefit of the AVC is that all race planes can be parked at near show-center. Though you can't camp show-center, its an amazing way to have a base of operations with coolers, chairs, air show watching, etc. We were parked one airplane in from the 18L taxiway and a short walk to the central square. It was prime parking!) Our speed this year was 190.4 mph - we would love to meet a 201 that is faster! Results for this year's race should be posted soon: https://www.airventurecuprace.com/racers/race-results/ If you want to try out air racing sooner than Oshkosh 2026, the Sport Air Race League still has a couple events left in Texas for the season: https://sportairrace.org/sarl/node/1

Bummer, hope you can make it! I think we're only going to make a couple quick days this year ourselves...

There was an awesome showing of Mooneys this year - I think they had 4-5 competing! Annabelle Kellogg & Gretchen Jahn (former CEO of Mooney) took 4th place in an M20E and Teresa Camp & Denise Robinson took 5th place in an M20J. Susan Beall - a Mooney owner - took second place flying with her race partner in a C-182. I am sad I missed it. Normally I am all about boasting about how fast my M20J is but in the 2024 race I wish it had handicapped a little slower If any of the boys on the forum have an interest in racing, I'd love a bit more competition in the Air Venture Cup! Added bonus, you get show center parking at Osh after the race if you want it! https://www.airraceclassic.org/top-ten-winners.htm

For everyone but mass arrivals, N40 is first come first serve. My suggestion if you want to be parked near the caravan is to arrive no later than Friday night. They rope off a huge section of the close-in parking in the N40 now for mass arrivals, and our experience the last few years is that starting on Saturday morning they put the arriving planes further out past the spaces reserved for *all* the groups of mass arrivals (like around the back toward Friar Tucks). Another good option is to come on Tuesday - though some mass arrival participants stay the whole show, a lot leave as soon as their Sunday or Monday mass arrival parties are over, which frees up "holes" in the mass arrival parking and you can get lucky and end up parked among them if you time it right. Just get intel from your friends at mass arrivals when this is happening its kind of random and then time your arrival. It happened to us one year as a happy coincidence (that was before the caravan people started shunning me and there were still MooneySpace parties at the mass arrivals tent where we all enjoyed pizza together, but that's neither here nor there). Unfortunately another year we got put in the middle of Cessna mass arrivals and you'd think that would be fun but some of those folks with all that Cessna cargo capability bring generators along - and seem to have no problem with running them overnight despite the extraordinary amount of noise it makes. Airplane noise = yes; generator noise = no.

I think this would be a great addition to the MAPA Safety Clinic (or from the posts above, they should bring this back to the MAPA Safety Clinic). When I went, they devoted several classroom hours to maintenance issues and tasks - seems like the time could be better spent in a hangar instead of the classroom opening up a Mooney or two and doing simple tasks like changing oil, spark plugs, battery, lights, etc. and walking through systems. Some of the other classroom content could easily be replaced for more time to spend on this. @jetdriven maybe something for you to consider providing this type of training if there's demand.

Obviously both arrivals have risks and it’s just a trade. I fly the Air Venture Cup race with its own risks. I love formation flying, it’s fun, we always intended on flying the Caravan but logistics prevented it. But the response to the midair turned me off of wanting to try - I know people inside the mass arrivals are satisfied with the safety culture but based on what they’ve chosen to share publicly it isn’t for me. Plus given the choice of pre-Oshkosh events, I would rather do the air race anyway My conclusion about comparative safety is based on data - though I have 15 safe years over Fisk, I’ve never done the actual mass arrival training so cannot compare based on personal experience. All I know is the rate of midairs in mass arrivals (1 in 2019, maybe something else happened with Cessnas but not a midair?) is higher than the rate at Fisk (last one was 2009?) especially considering the volume of traffic over Fisk exceeds mass arrivals by an order of magnitude. I think the last MS get together with the Caravan I attended was 2019 - we ordered pizza and had a great time. Many of us were also invited to join the Caravan bbq too. It also used to be if you timed your regular arrival near to the caravan scheduled time you’d be parked in the N40 within a few rows of the caravan. But lately the N40 has been reserving so much special parking for all the mass arrivals, single arrivals that arrive around the same time get sent really far away - if you want parking as close as the mass arrivals get you really have to get in on Thursday or show up midweek and get a spot when they are filling holes. Good parking is a definite good reason to do the mass arrivals these days. I would love to see the get together come back.

There’s a lyric “I’m the problem, it’s me.” Indeed, some of us here - including me - were critical of the Caravan’s lack of transparency and incomplete public explanations (“you’ll have to come to a clinic and find out”) after their 2019 midair. Not going to rehash my thoughts, you can find the old threads, including the wrap up one after their presentation at Oshkosh a couple years after the incident. It seems to me direction went out or there was universal consensus in the Caravan to no longer discuss the Caravan here (I had a very weird interaction with a Caravan leader who insisted I come back here and report everything I heard at their presentation here on MS - as if he couldn’t do so himself?) It is a shame, there used to be MS/caravan gatherings at osh for those of us unable to participate in the caravan for whatever reasons. If they are still happening, I don’t know, but I haven’t been invited to one. I am happy the caravan continues to thrive, formation flying is fun and camaraderie is great for the community. But the data doesn’t support the mass arrivals claims that they are a safer method of Oshkosh arrival than Fisk.

In addition to Byron’s comment on this, we *also* asked this very question on 2. There was a year I was really busy and not flying very often, I have well over enough time to meet the open pilot, and we asked the insurance agent if it was a good idea to drop me from the policy (Byron’s much higher time would entitle him to a much lower rate without me being named). The answer we got was every owner or member of the LLC must be named if they are going to manipulate the controls.

I’m interested in @Parker_Woodruff’s take on this. Our agent has said she’s rarely seen insurance go after an occasional user open pilot in a privately owned plane with subrogation. She said it’s more common for flight school/rental policies to subrogate.

Ok. Fair enough. We’ve only been able to get smooth limits at all on our policy maybe 3 of my last 12 years of airplane ownership purportedly due to my lack of experience. So losing smooth limits for the one month of the air race was what it was. They wouldn’t give us smooth limits for my race partner at any price due to her lack of time in a Mooney (despite instrument, commercial, >500 TT, >50 hrs complex).

That was absolutely disallowed by our constitution policy. We inquired with this exact question. Both CFI and “student” must be named on policy if plane is being used for flight instruction (or the student must be covered by open pilot) to be a covered operation by the insurance. We asked this question just recently for my ARC partner who was going to be taking instruction from my husband in our plane. She had to be named before instruction began. Also at least with our old insurance, every pilot who is an owner of the plane (or owner of plane LLC) must be named on the policy to operate the controls (for example - one spouse meets open pilot so you drop them from insurance.)