201er

Having this discussion in advance, making your choice, and ground flying how you would handle it might help avoid the "reflex" and go with the most recent/most trained decision. Not for certain, but a much better chance than making the choice in a split moment on the spot when it happens.

That’s awfully nice of you trying to save the insurance money but how do you know the front of the plane doesn’t look like this?

If you've been going a few years and you've been happy with the work, you may be better off just sucking it up. It's a lot worse when you have someone do terrible work and terribly overcharge you on everything. There are loads of shops that will do a bad job, not fix what they mess up, and overcharge you too. There are plenty of shops that would charge every hour of work and then some. I've had shops round up every minute of work to like a quarter hour minimum. They end up doing 10x under 5 minute tasks that don't even add up to an hour but then bill you 2.5 hours by rounding it all up to the quarter hour minimum. There's no shop that won't mess something up doing maintenance. The difference is how they handle it, how they bill it, and how frequently they mess up. Definitely avoid the shops that are messing things up all the time and don't make things right. Sounds like you actually got a pretty good deal financially and a discount. Not an expensive annual to begin with. Going to a new shop is a risk (may be better, may be worse) and you're guaranteed to get hit with a huge bill the first year when they insist on doing everything different than the last one. You're in for a real treat if you walk away and look for another shop. Could get lucky but odds are you'll get screwed by a couple other shops before you find a decent one or end up going back and realizing you had it pretty good.

Save the world or save your girlfriend? If you found yourself in the position where you forgot to extend the gear and touched the prop to the ground, and you had enough mental capacity to realize what happened and resist acting on reflex, would you take the crash or go around to land on the wheels? It’s obviously a split second decision so you don’t get to weigh all the variables but what’s your default choice under the circumstance.

Not sure if this has been discussed but it just made the Aviation 3 minutes of fame:

Is the steel cage really there as a crash survival feature??? As opposed to a vestigial relic of times past when fabric was used?

LoPresti Fury would do that speed but only on 200hp

Substantial cost savings on insurance should be a pilot’s top priority! That means someone besides yourself thinks you’re less likely to end up in an aviation accident!

People forgetting how to fly over winter? Rough spring winds? Increased used Mooney sales to new pilots?

Is it a surprise then how many newly purchased Mooneys get gear-upped in the first week or month of ownership?

You think that’s bad? Wait till you see this?

Why not? Are you saying people use it as instructions how to fly the plane? I thought it’s a “check” list, not a do list or instruction manual. Surely people have stories of “genuinely forgot to put the gear down but then did the checklist and caught it in time.” Or a bunch of other things like that?

Share about the most consequential situations a checklist saved you? What did you miss and what would have happened if you didn’t catch it thanks to the checklist? Or what regrets do you have from situations that could have been prevented through checklist use?

The FAA had a prior graphic that looked awful similar to the whole descending turn "teardrop" method:

How do you personally typically enter the traffic pattern at an airport without an operating control tower when you arrive from the upwind side (opposite side from traffic pattern). 1 - Join on the upwind leg 2 - Perform a "teardrop" descending turn after crossing above the downwind leg 3 - Fly way past the airport and pattern and turn around some way and enter a normal 45 4 - Overfly midfield and directly join the downwind 5 - Fly an opposite direction (from usual pattern) base to final 6 - Navigate to a point to join a straight in final