AndyFromCB

Capitol Avionics is good for one major reason. They are the ones that actually designed all the test gear for Bendix/King in the 1980's and early 1990's.

Have you ever worked on an aircraft? I've worked on a few and it appears to me that Al Mooney's first wife must have run off with an avionics technician. Not a single single other than maybe a Socata TB-20/21 have been designed with any sort of avionics access in mind. After a little while I threw in the towel and realized it's a lot easier to just stay at work and make real money than to try to save pennies working on my own airplane. Took me almost a month to get over a pinched nerve I got twisting to get my HSI out. Screw that. I tell my mechanic all the time he doesn't charge enough ;-) Anyone capable of being shocked by an aircraft maintenance bill should buy a boat or an RV for a hobby. The base charge for a Pilatus annual is about the same as G36.You want to know why? Look at the PC-12 access panels. Got to love them Swiss.

There was Netscape before IE, MySpace before Facebook, Yahoo before Google, etc, etc, etc. True innovators almost never understand the concept of execution. Garmin rocks in that area.

GMX-200 rebooting for no apparent reason is quite normal. Believe it or not, it runs on Windows XP. It really is not a Garmin product, but an inherited/updated UPS/Apolo MX-20. As to Capitol Avionics, if anyone can do it, they can. They've rebuild my pitch servo for KFC150 a few months ago for like $1800. Welcome to the airplane world where shit breaks all the time, nobody can tell you how much it will be to fix it and you get blank stares when you question a $10K bill ;-) KFC-150 is one of the finest autopilots ever built when it works and from my experience, the overall system has a MTBF of about 200hours before writing a $2000 to $4000 check so about $20 to $40 a flight hour to keep it working.

Was there another item on your bill, for the magneto fluid? Anyway, let us know what you find out.

To move up to it's big brother, the TBM.

It must be one fancy motor for $10K. Even a brand spanking new pitch trim servo for PC-12/47 is "only" $15K. I'd look for a serviceable part on controller or ebay. What's the autopilot? Was KFC-200 even put into Mooneys or just the KFC-150?

From my experience, TKS makes you pretty much impervious to light to moderate ice as long as fluid is flowing. You have about an hour to decide what to do and quite frankly I've never seen icing last more than 15 minutes, even crossing fronts, as long as done with some brains, as in at 90 degrees and not along the front. Nothing and I mean nothing sticks to the airframe. It's almost kind of "fun" watching it grow on your landing lights. Mooney's TKS installation is one of the best. The trick is to have the system recently primed because otherwise it's a long 5 to 10 minutes to shed anything on max setting. As to ice without TKS, I've landed with about an inch on my Bravo last spring in Wyoming because I didn't expect it and doing it flap-less at 95knots over the fence didn't pose any major problems. It did touch down at about 65knots instead of the usual 55knots so it does bump up your stall speed quite a bit and it did require carrying about 20inches of manifold pressure to keep the speed up so I'd be worried about doing it in a naturally aspirated bird.

Well, we're not exactly and have never been known for long term thinking, now have we? On what exactly is your proposal here or for that matter all you other chicken hawks? Go to war against Russia for messing in their "internal" affairs? We've been invading and meddling in central america for last 60 years to the point where most of it is so broken that good portion of people there see no other option but to "invade" us via the southern border. I don't see Russia bitching about that. I'm sure you all will be the first to volunteer and happily contributed 90% of your income to the IRS to pay for it all. Yeah right. Please explain to me what exactly do you propose we do? Bomb Moscow? Good luck with that…Why is it that most so called fiscal conservatives are incapable of doing simple cost to benefit analysis. 9/11 was a clear example: $2 billion of buildings destroyed, which insurance paid for, $1.4 trillion down the drain that accomplished exactly opposite of the mission statement. US turned the whole world upside down, created giant power vacuums in a giant cluster fuck of a mission, instead of what should have been a law enforcement operation. Every time we bomb another wedding and/or funeral, we just simply create more "terrorists" and quite frankly, it's pretty hard calling anyone shooting at us in Afganistan terrorists at this point. Under Geneva convention the occupied have a right to attack the occupier. Do I feel bad every time another dumb, young American kid that drunk too much patriotic koolaid gets killed over there. You bet you I do. But their lives are no different than hundreds of thousands of lives we've destroyed in the middle east. And Putin was nothing more than a mid level paper pusher, not a head of KGB. And Europe does not heat with oil, it heats with natural gas. Get your basic facts in order before arriving at conclusions. Details matter. That's where the devil's at. Patriotic fervor combined with too little in terms of details, especially in departments of geography and history, is how we got into this mess in the first place. Take a note of Iraq's border drawn with a ruler by some Brit 80 years ago. Show me another stable country with straight line borders. There isn't any. You know why? Because stable borders take hundreds of years of small wars to finally settle up solution agreeable to all involved. Our fearless leaders apparently missed that. Seems to me older Bush understood that clearly when he did not push to Bagdad. Sometimes an apple does indeed fall far from a tree, and apparently bruises too. History repeats itself first as tragedy second as farce. Our own little Ukraine, known to most who were interested long before 1997 declassification of documents: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Guatemala We're all guilty of doing the same shit. That's it for tonight, kids.

Yes, the omission has to be substantial to the matter at hand, but that's not for the jury to decide. That will be decided in evidentiary hearings by your honor aka an-ex partner in law "promoted" to position of a judge.

Have many cases have you been deposed for? How many cases have you sat to select a jury for? I assure you, from my own personal experience, and being I've work in insurance since 1997, there have been many, by the time both sides are done with selection, there is not one person left on that jury with an IQ over 80. If any of the lawyers on either side have a single brain cell left functioning (granted, that would maybe be 20% of JDs out there), you'd be out quicker than I can say objection. Last thing I'll ever want on any jury is someone who is too eager to serve. I never said it's not our civic duty, however, doesn't matter a bit anymore since instructing the jury of nullification leads to automatic mistrial. I simply stated that both sides will pick the dumbest of the dumb they can find. Jury duty is pretty much slavery and smart slaves do lousy work and attorneys know that.

Actually it's impossible to weasel out paying a claim for stupid, even if stupid was on purpose. If that was the case, then 80% or so of aviation claims would not paid. And about 99% of vehicle claims. However, factual omission on an application, is perfectly good grounds for denying a claim until of course it gets in front of group of people too stupid to get out of jury duty aka compassionate folks.

Well, I think we can point some fingers at the Ruskies too. It's not like one can just go to Walmart and pick up a ground to air missile. They have been supplying heavy weaponry to a bunch of jackasses. One can only hope it backfires on them eventually...

$185K Hull, 1million smooth, 750TT, 670RG, $2500, Chartis I actually looked it up this morning, I thought it was a bit cheaper, but it I was confusing policies

Yeah, and then wait for screaming from all the old farts usually sitting around the airport, already bitching about everything under the sun, especially their long lost medical application as their shove another doughnut down their throat. It is apparently a right of every American GA pilot, to go up, after six months of not flying and shoot an ADF approach down to 200, 1/4 mile visibility in an airplane "maintained" by Bubba with a budget of .5AMU a year, mostly spent on pencil sharpeners. To say otherwise is pure socialism and to require a working autopilot while single pilot IFR would down right put us even with North Korea in the human rights department. As far as I am concerned, there was no "slow-play" here. He made a substantial, fraudulent omission on his insurance application. I'm not surprised they eventually paid out due to 12 morons in the jury box, but clearly he was at fault here in more ways than one. While generally I am not a big fan of Frank Robinson, I like their idea of forming their own, off shore insurance company, not subject to our judicial system. My understanding is, they pay and pay quickly, when within the terms of the contract but otherwise tell you to get lost. Their premiums are about half what a US based company must charge to insure a R22 or R44.

AIG/Chartis, not 80 hours RR time, I've been with AIG since 2009, had 80TT when I insured my Arrow, 1 million smooth. Now I'm closing in on 750TT, so maybe things have changed.

Well, GA might not be safe, but it sure as shiat beats flying Malaysia Airlnes... Looks to me like the Ruskies shot themselves down an airliner

$3000+ for first year sounds excessive. I had my Arrow insured for $65K, 1 million smooth and the policy was $1600 or so from AIG.The liability will be the same and the hull value on a M20C will be next to nothing, 50K at most.

I've had a million smooth since about 80 hours total time, always in a retractable from the start. You can't find it or you're not willing to pay for it?

I'm pretty positive several states already require insurance and I highly doubt there is much of a difference in accident rates. From my recollection of being a 300 hour pilot with an ink still drying on my instrument certificate, the insurance company wanted a 3 hour checkout on my Bravo. That was about long enough to get myself into some deep doodoo on my next few flights…How fast can you say PIO 3 times. Quite frankly I am always surprised that someone from so called liberal media is always so concerned when conservatives are falling out of the sky ;-)

I think you're are truly underestimating the "little extra cost" of two transactions. They are not little. Sales tax, registration and not to mention working out kinks out two aircraft. There is a lot of things that can go wrong with a Cherokee. Mostly little things, but it being aviation, little things start at a grand and go up from there. As to gear speed and floating, well, at least nobody ever landed a Mooney short of a runway ;-)

I'm highly doubtful that was the case. That giant 40 inch antenna upfront tills up and down, left and right pretty well. And no amount of turning will do anything to help with attenuation. Most software code that runs modern radar detects and portrays attenuation pretty well, however, I don't understand how any amount of tilting is going to allow you to paint a picture past where all the energy is already reflected due the severity of the return.

Actually, a building thunderstorm will readily show up on stormscope but not yet on nexrad, in any spot, right/wrong or otherwise. All that NEXRAD shows is rain. A building thunderstorm will have a lot of static discharge for stormscope to pick up but not much if any base reflectivity and possibly not much composite reflectivity either. As to skirting cells with stormscope, not a really wise idea. While the direction of the cell is pretty dead on, the distance is a wild guess. Eyeballs go a long way...

Actually, doesn't have much to do with hemoglobin. Excess hemoglobin causes some major side effects, so even as us flat landers acclimatize to high altitudes when climbing 8,000 meter peaks, this increases our risk for hypertension, stroke and other cardiac events considerably. The way the Sherpa people cope with it is via a a special mutation in EPAS1 protein and actually have less hemoglobin in the bodies than flat landers and their bodies have considerably lower cell level oxygen saturation. Nobody actually quite understands how it functions but current theories are that the mutation allows for much higher balance and duration of anaerobic activity. It's quite a unique adaptation, different from people living in high Andes mountains. It's been genetically traced to interbreeding with another humanoid specie approximately 30,000 years ago, called a Denisovans.

Very well could be. Then again, I was walking the old ute trail yesterday morning, taking film of marmots, about 2 hours later 7 people got struck by lighting, one died.