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.)

Also - Avemeco has an insurance policy for married pilots where they set the price based on the more experienced pilot rather than the less experienced pilot in the couple. We didn’t like the Avemco policy for other reasons but something to consider.

No lying required when other pilots in the plane are mere passengers. Happens all the time, people take friends (or wives) flying who aren’t insured on the airplane. The problem is when - as suggested in this thread - that the uninsured pilot is not a passenger but actually manipulating the controls and logging time. Then you might get into a situation where the lie is required. NTSB reports often note when passengers have pilot certificates. I think there is a reasonable chance of someone - the feds or the insurance - inquiring about who is flying when there are multiple certificated pilots on board. Insurance often also take witness statements and could ask the same question of your “passengers.” just playing it out for you.

To be clear here - we actually saved money when we added my race partner. We ended up having to drop smooth limits (our insurer wouldn’t cover her on the smooth policy), which resulted in a $300 refund. There was no question we were always going to insure her for the race; but we asked the insurer if Byron (already named on policy) could instruct her to get her time in the plane before we added her to the policy, and the answer was no — both the instructor and the “student” had to be named on the policy or covered by the open pilot policy starting from day 1.

Let’s play it out further. When the FAA or NTSB interviews you, are you going to lie about what you were doing? Will your wife also lie when they ask? Then when the insurance company asks you to sign an affidavit under penalty of perjury when they pay out the claim will you lie there too? Sure, you can get “cute” about this whole thing, but what it amounts to is not much more than insurance fraud. We have asked our agent about all these variations - we’d save a lot of money if we could insure just Byron on the plane and not me. But that’s just not the way it works when you have a two pilot couple both of whom will be flying the plane. (Also another complication, we have had insurance policies which prohibit right seat flying except for the purpose of flight instruction or training to be a flight instructor. The person receiving instruction in the left seat must be named on the policy or eligible to fly under the open pilot.) All this is hypothetical because OP’s wife clearly has enough experience to be insurable now. And I think many of you might find this hard to believe but she might want the freedom to fly her own airplane without her husband in it.

I am pretty happy with it all things considered for a first race and learned a lot about how to do better next time. We also won prizes on 4 of the legs (1 first place leg, 2 second place legs, and 1 third place leg.) 3rd place overall went to a very experienced Mooney racer flying her M20J, team “Over the Moon.” I feel a little bit like someone who trains for a marathon and says “I just want to run one once and cross it off my bucket list” only to be looking for the next marathon opportunity right when they get home. I hope to do it again, but the time commitment is pretty steep for anyone with limited vacation time. One amazing thing about this race is the airports in the route - amazing, they had food, spectators, hordes of volunteers from 99s, EAA, CAP, local schools acting as pit crew, meteorologists on site for briefings, water, swag, rides to hotels, etc. It was an overwhelming amount of support every time we landed.

It was interesting how this all worked out. The situation sucks. Frankly, as to the destroyed Mooney, I am disappointed EAA didn’t make things right with the property damage in excess of your insured value. They have some culpability for failure to enforce their own safety rules. I assume they didn’t because they are worried about exposure for the helicopter wrongful death.

My view of a pre buy is that no loggable maintenance except for an oil change should be performed without the owners’ express permission and clear authorization as to who will be paying regardless of the status of the sale. The annual should only begins once the sale goes through. As a buyer you wouldn’t want to pay an annual if you weren’t buying anyway. The idea of a pre buy and an annual are the same thing is a little out of touch with what you are looking for on a pre buy. I know lots of owners don’t like the plane leaving the field for a pre buy. But I think ferrying it a reasonable distance is a fair ask. Most airports don’t let off field mechanics to work on their field, so being unwilling to ferry basically amounts to limiting the mechanic who can do a pre buy. I think a reasonable deposit buys down a lot of seller risk. You should know your planes condition well enough to know there’s not something so badly wrong that it will get grounded and not be ferry-able.

lol, I love my undeserved reputation for power here :). If only the reality matched! In all seriousness, we advise many people not to get a pre buy from a mechanic on field with the airplane or a mechanic that regularly maintains the plane…. It seems reasonable to practice what you preach. Also, there’s just a built in conflict here - is the mechanic supposed to betray a long time customer and blow up a deal by finding something bad they really should have found before? And what if the mechanic missed something then just keeps missing it on the pre buy? Everyone is just more comfortable with the sale if there’s an independent assessment. It’s crazy that even MSC’s won’t respond to a call about a pre buy - I know there’s some MSC shops regularly on MooneySpace, I wonder if they’d chime in about what’s going on? Seems like Mooney pre buys would be a required service for them to provide. Unfortunately, Mooney is not currently authorizing new MSC’s afaik.

If you’re anything like Byron, no matter how much gas he has the perfect plane has 10 gallons more…

I am surprised @jetdriven has not already jumped in to reply to this. I think he's written a few posts on this on the vendor forum. The quality and thoroughness of annuals vary. But in RPM's experience, a no-repairs checklist following the Mooney Factory Checklist recommended steps takes between 30-35 hrs. If you get quoted for a flat rate that takes less time, ask your mechanics if they do the annual in reference to this checklist or if they skip any of the steps on the checklist to make the annual go faster (and if so, make sure you are ok with whatever steps do they skip). Also if offered a low flat rate, make sure to ask what is included in the flat rate (I have seen bills that add 3 hrs for an oil change on top of a "flat rate" annual, that actually happened to a girlfriend of mine on her first annual, or or other items that you might assume would be included in the annual). Assuming a $100/hr labor rate (though in the midatlantic area some of the local shops have gone up to as high as $130-140/hr labor rate!!), you're looking at $3000-3500 plus materials (oil, filter, etc.). My personal observations is that first annuals in a new relationship with a mechanic - especially a thorough mechanic - are rarely no-repairs, straight time projects. They will find deferred or unsatisfactory work from previous owners. You will have squawks. When we bought our plane, experienced airplane owners told us "just plan $10k on that stuff in the first year of ownership." And I think that tends to run true for most of my friends that have bought planes both here and back in Texas for their year 1 annual expenses, whether incurred at annual or throughout the year. One thing I've been surprised learning since Byron opened RPM is how many planes do not have AD lists. If a mechanic has to compile an AD list from scratch because they don't want to rely on the previous mechanic's statement "all AD's complied with" but did not show their work or provide any info on which AD's are applicable or how they've been complied with, that's several hours of additional time but its a one time deal, because you will have an AD list going forward. This is super baffling to me, we would've wanted an AD list at pre-buy. Not sure why this isn't a thing everyone has.