FloridaMan

Two things I picked up in my October trip. Wear your seatbelt at all times and keep it tight. My flight was smooth until I hit about 15 seconds of severe clear air turbulence. Carry chapstick and use it liberally or you will have severe chapped lips from the dry air + altitude.

There is a harness in there. Granted, there are people buying and selling cars flooded from Sandy and they're perfectly fine with them. I would consider it a critical omission to not have disclosure of the history of the parts.

Hate to bring it up, but I just want to ask if those came out of the flood/crash plane N9218M / N199Q that crashed recently.

Not just no, but NO FUCKING WAY. Great for added situational awareness. I'd be ok with an iPod touch being the display for engine data, but as I've said numerous times, and I will say this again, in all caps. DO NOT TRUST YOUR IPAD TO DELIVER INFORMATION THAT YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON. YOUR TABLET WILL CONFIDENTLY REPORT INCORRECT DATA TO YOU IN A MANNER THAT IS FULLY CONVINCING. Ever meet somebody who is absolutely brilliant and gives you a great and correct answer 99% of the time, but the 1% of the time when they're wrong, they're really fucking wrong -- but you can't tell because you don't know yourself, and they deliver their facts to you with the same level of confidence as they do when they're absolutely correct? Your iPad is like that, and you just might not have caught it when it was lying to you.

-- as if there isn't already a huge economic incentive for such a thing. According to Wikipedia, one gallon of 100LL contains 1.2-2 grams of something called TEL, which has around 600mg of lead per gram. Given that range, I think saying 1 gram of lead per gallon of 100LL. Paint up until around 1950 often was comprised of 10-50% lead. I imagine that old houses getting rained on has an infinitely greater environmental impact than the gram of lead that gets burned in every gallon of fuel. Let us not forget that many environmental regulations don't apply at all when it comes to aviation. You can still get Chlorinated solvents, for instance (AVL is awesome if you haven't tried it to degrease something yet -- also really nice for cleaning oil out if you spill some when you do your oil changes, since it gets the flammable content out from around your engine).

I had a girl with me pee in the back of the plane. She went before we left. IFR departure BKN at 700; OVC at 1000. An hour in she really had to go; it was only a 2.5 hour flight and I did not want to divert and shoot an IFR approach to minimums, stop and let her out, file and take off again. Those pee bags work, but take a minute to gel up.

I had fully intended to come to this one today, but, once again, something came up...literally. I had food poisoning One of these days...

I'm scared to stall my plane without someone who knows Mooneys on-board. The stalls have always been a non-event, aside from me being nervous about them. I keep my feet very loose on the rudders and never put in firm input without a counter from the other foot to ensure that my nerves haven't jammed the opposite pedal against me.

Fast-forward to the 36 second mark.

Great... shouldn't Barnstormers be notified that they're listing parts that have been submerged in water?

I think Austria wins in this one.

When I'm over 7 it ends up on the belly and the windshield. My plane is happy between 6 and 7, but it fouls quickly -- not as badly las when I first got it though. My A&P prescribed 25 - 30 hour oil changes for me, though it seems to be improving. I think that I may have been running it too rich when I first got it, and that 5 hour flight with a bad mag may have contributed to it as well.

Does that mean when I am in Europe that I can rent N-registered aircraft with my US ratings? That sure beats flying mine across the ocean.

I couldn't get financing on my aircraft because of an unresolved loan from 43 years ago. I figured out a way to margin my securities at a lower interest rate and paid that off. Getting turned down was a real blessing. You'd think that being a certificated pilot and an aircraft owner would give you some points for integrity. It certainly works socially and professionally -- and, as a group (and I may be biased), and while pilots tend to be more bold than most people, they comprise the best group of people I've met. You can't bullshit your way through flight training and into a high performance aircraft like some people can bullshit their way through med school. Or, to put it another way, I've met a lot more douchebag doctors (pilots excepted) than I have douchebag pilots.

I had the same concerns with my plane. Willmar located it for me, had done the annuals for the previous 20 years and were really the most qualified for the PPI (which includes stuff not normally done in an annual such as more in-depth corrosion inspections). If I hadn't lost my job back in March, I would seriously consider bringing it back up to them this month for the annual this year.

It had a cylinder replaced at annual about 20 months ago at annual by the previous owner; he said it'd been slowly losing compression each year and decided to just go ahead and have it replaced. It's due for an annual within the next month (I had an early annual when I purchased it as part of the sale). I have a couple oil leaks, one of them being at the oil pressure relief valve, the other at the bolts that go through the crank case. I change the oil every 25-30 hours as that's how long it takes to get dirty. It feels like one of the cylinders is a bit weaker than the others when I pull the prop through, but I don't hear it in the starter.

When I was shopping, that plane would have caught my attention.

Strange they said 135kts and 10gph on their website. I get around 158kts in my LoPresti "F" at just that burn and I would think that a stock "E" would give me a run for my money. I think that's a fair asking price.

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I figured it being the vintage group that we all had the IO360s or O360s

Just curious. I seem to get around 5-8 hours before I need to add a quart. My engine has 18 years and 1500 hours on it.

http://www.avweb.com/news/savvyaviator/savvy_aviator_56_before_you_yank_that_jug_197497-1.html

That is one reason that I don't want digital gauges. I read somewhere that the guy who developed the old analog EGT gauge intentionally left values off of it as they didn't matter. When I was doing my IFR rating in a DA40, I remember disliking the digital altitude, airspeed ribbons and the jumpy rate of turn indicator. I found that watching your altitude bounce up and down 20 feet was much more fatiguing than the sight picture of a clock-faced analog gauge. Not only would you have the numbers jumping around, but you didn't have an image of where your airspeed or altitude should be like you do on the steam gauges. VFR altitude, big hand down; IFR, big hand up. I think having precise data logged is great, but from a human factors perspective, these gadgets should reduce the workload and aid in decision making, not increase the data that the busy pilot of a single pilot aircraft has to interpret.

I don't even look at my green light; I use my fingernail against the johnson bar. As far as the red light goes, and I would assume that the lights on the '71 are the same as my '67's, I always twist it to close the iris after I pull the gear up. When I start my final descent/approach, I turn it back on so I don't get complacent with a red light shining in my face in flight.