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'64 M20C crosswind limitations?


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3 minutes ago, Hank said:

Yankton is a nice airport, 2 runways and everything! Full service fuel,  and a free tow to the pump and back. Now I need to find the pictures, it was pre-cell phone camera . . .

ILS approach too, was always good to have a practice airport nearby.  It's been a while since I've been in there.

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1 hour ago, cctsurf said:

Took a second to find it, it was 8/1/2012...  Here's the weather report from Yankton, SD.  I was ~12 miles SE in Vermillion.  I can post a picture of the logbook entry if you want...

https://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KYKN/2012/8/1/DailyHistory.html?req_city=KVMR&req_state=SD&req_statename=South+Dakota&reqdb.zip=57069&reqdb.magic=4&reqdb.wmo=99999

I have landed my F in crosswind components strong enough to cause the tires to side skid on roll out and it was > 30mph but not by much. I'm not saying you didn't do what you said you did. I will say that any instructor that says a short ruddered short body "can easily handle it" is doing his students a disservice, because it's simply not true.

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I have a C model with short rudder. In a stiff crosswind what works best for me is the crab approach (no flaps and extra speed) then low wing JUST before touchdown. I will let it dissipate some energy on the flare but not nearly as much as in a typical landing. I set her down a little faster than normal but I retain good control throughout. Practice and you will be surprised how well even a short rudder Mooney handles a crosswind.


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On a side note, and it may be my imagination, but it sure seems the high desert crosswinds push you less than crosswinds at sea level in Florida. If windspeed is measured as actual (is it?) at high altitude airports and our aircraft are showing indicated airspeed, which reads under true airspeed at altitude, then would it make sense that a crosswind at high altitude and/or dry airports would simply have less density/fewer molecules of air and moisture pushing against the sides of our airplanes?

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This thread makes me want to go lookup a similar thread I started before beginning my Mooney transition training last February.  Almost all my flying previous to buying the Mooney was tailwheel.  I even started threads on here and another pilot forum asking if I was biting off more than I could chew with such a wild idea as the unobtainable goal of learning to fly a Mooney.  In the course of my lack of self confidence, I saw that there was going to be cross wind on the day my C was to be delivered and thought I was doomed.

At the time there were two schools of thought regarding crosswind and everything else about the impossible task of a non Mooney pilot being so brazen as to believe that he could ever transition without an instructor with a thousand hours or more and at least 100 students successfully transitioned to the impossible to fly and mysterious Mooney.  The other school of thought was those who shrugged their shoulders and said something like “what’s the big deal it’s just another airplane?”

I read all the posts about the early C’s not having enough rudder authority and all the other warnings implying that I would die in a crosswind.  All the time while selecting flowers I did not consider my own landing technique in my little Cessna 140 in which I had logged about a thousand landings to include gusty and variable crosswinds.  My crosswind technique from the very beginning was “ just enough rudder to keep it parallel to the runway and just enough aileron to keep it on the centerline and not drifting one way or the other.”

As luck would have it, the day my instructor delivered the plane to my home field and began my transition training the wind was forecast to change to a gusty crosswind.  In addition, it was a day of pretty choppy winds.  After all the you will die advice from the naysayers that doomed the lowly Cessna 140 pilot to sure death I notified the funeral home of the assured business and got in the plane anyway.  We started doing landings and I worked to learn the landing gear and getting the feel of the airplane in the flair.  After most of the day of landings less than perfect, but acceptable, we knocked off for the day, had dinner and I put him in a hotel for the night.  Once I got to the house that night, it occurred to me that I had been crosswind landing in a 13 knot or more gusty crosswind all day and was still alive and really the crosswind was a non event not noticed due to focusing on everything else.  Although I was not greasing it in as I would have liked, this thing was much easier to deal with in a crosswind than the little putt-putt I had been flying all this time.

NOW!.... I said all that to make this point:  I realize that there is a school of thought and even verbiage in Airman’s manuals that pretty much dictate crab into the wind and straighten up at the last minute, BUT using the crosswind technique I was taught by the old school tailwheel instructor allows you to handle all the crosswind that a normal human being would want to fly in.

I join those who recommend transition training be done by a Mooney savvy instructor, but if you are experienced at crosswind landing with the technique I described, crosswinds will be nothing new at all and if you can do them in a taildragger, or the same technique in any airplane, you won’t even know there is a crosswind..  You will just put her down.

Landing a Mooney in a crosswind is like anything else with a Mooney.  Just learn the right techniques and go enjoy yourself.  As I recall Mooney indicated that an 11 knot crosswind is not a crosswind in an early model.  I contend that the number is much higher than that if you use the right technique.

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I am not big on touch and go’s, but if there is plenty of runway I will do them if an instructor is wanting me to.  I did my BFR Saturday and he pulled the power near the airport.  I brought it in power off good enough to walk away, but he had me take off while still rolling and then he pulled the power again after we climbed out.  I was on a 6,500’ runway so it really wasn’t a problem.  I am beginning my instrument work with this guy and still getting used to him.  He pushes you hard which I like, but it will be interesting if he gets carried away with touch and goes.  My plan is to let him take me through IR, Commercial and ME, but with everything going on in my life, something might get in the way.

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On 11/13/2017 at 6:58 PM, MBDiagMan said:

I am not big on touch and go’s, but if there is plenty of runway I will do them if an instructor is wanting me to.  I did my BFR Saturday and he pulled the power near the airport.  I brought it in power off good enough to walk away, but he had me take off while still rolling and then he pulled the power again after we climbed out.  I was on a 6,500’ runway so it really wasn’t a problem.  I am beginning my instrument work with this guy and still getting used to him.  He pushes you hard which I like, but it will be interesting if he gets carried away with touch and goes.  My plan is to let him take me through IR, Commercial and ME, but with everything going on in my life, something might get in the way.

Touch and goes are a non event in a Mooney as well. Just don't forget anything! Having an instructor on board sometimes can cause a pilot to fixate so much on one aspect of the lesson that they forget something...like the gear or clearance to land. The instructor should always catch it, but there have been plenty of incidents during trading operations where perfectly usable landing gear was left retracted for the landing.

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32 minutes ago, steingar said:

I'm wondering about this thing about old Mooney's not having big enough rudders.  Mine is a 62, which is pretty old.  The rudder runs the full span of the vertical stabilizer and looks plenty big to me.  Seems to slip just fine, too.

Older vintage Mooney rudders extend from the horizontal stabilizer to the top of the tail. On later vintage Mooneys, like my 1970 C, the rudder also extends below the horizontal stabilizer, to the bottom of the tail cone. Larger rudder area means more force for crosswind correction. 

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31 minutes ago, steingar said:

I'm wondering about this thing about old Mooney's not having big enough rudders.  Mine is a 62, which is pretty old.  The rudder runs the full span of the vertical stabilizer and looks plenty big to me.  Seems to slip just fine, too.

The "short rudder" (which is what your C is equipped with) is plenty adequate in my opinion, it's just that the long rudder offers more control authority. I cannot envision a scenario where a pilot would ever say "this would be great flying airplane if only it didn't have so damn much rudder authority".  There's no downside to the full length rudder, but that doesn't make the short ruddered birds bad.

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I remember when I was owning and flying our C150 they came out with an AD that required you to install rubber stops on the existing metal rudder stops to prevent the rudder from becomming jammed to the side. This was the result of two accidents where the crashed airplane had the rudder stuck in this position 2 out of over 17000 150's and one was out of annual the other could not be determined if the rudder caused the crash or if the crash caused the jammed rudder. The alternative to the stops was to place a placard on the panel stating intentional spins prohibited. I opted for the placard since the rubber stops reduced rudder athority and whos to say if my spin was intentional.  I have yet to encounter crosswinds that our short rudder can't cope with. 15 to 20kts at 75 to 90 degrees is pretty common at home.

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On 11/13/2017 at 6:43 PM, MBDiagMan said:

This thread makes me want to go lookup a similar thread I started before beginning my Mooney transition training last February.  Almost all my flying previous to buying the Mooney was tailwheel.  I even started threads on here and another pilot forum asking if I was biting off more than I could chew with such a wild idea as the unobtainable goal of learning to fly a Mooney.  In the course of my lack of self confidence, I saw that there was going to be cross wind on the day my C was to be delivered and thought I was doomed.

At the time there were two schools of thought regarding crosswind and everything else about the impossible task of a non Mooney pilot being so brazen as to believe that he could ever transition without an instructor with a thousand hours or more and at least 100 students successfully transitioned to the impossible to fly and mysterious Mooney.  The other school of thought was those who shrugged their shoulders and said something like “what’s the big deal it’s just another airplane?”

I read all the posts about the early C’s not having enough rudder authority and all the other warnings implying that I would die in a crosswind.  All the time while selecting flowers I did not consider my own landing technique in my little Cessna 140 in which I had logged about a thousand landings to include gusty and variable crosswinds.  My crosswind technique from the very beginning was “ just enough rudder to keep it parallel to the runway and just enough aileron to keep it on the centerline and not drifting one way or the other.”

As luck would have it, the day my instructor delivered the plane to my home field and began my transition training the wind was forecast to change to a gusty crosswind.  In addition, it was a day of pretty choppy winds.  After all the you will die advice from the naysayers that doomed the lowly Cessna 140 pilot to sure death I notified the funeral home of the assured business and got in the plane anyway.  We started doing landings and I worked to learn the landing gear and getting the feel of the airplane in the flair.  After most of the day of landings less than perfect, but acceptable, we knocked off for the day, had dinner and I put him in a hotel for the night.  Once I got to the house that night, it occurred to me that I had been crosswind landing in a 13 knot or more gusty crosswind all day and was still alive and really the crosswind was a non event not noticed due to focusing on everything else.  Although I was not greasing it in as I would have liked, this thing was much easier to deal with in a crosswind than the little putt-putt I had been flying all this time.

NOW!.... I said all that to make this point:  I realize that there is a school of thought and even verbiage in Airman’s manuals that pretty much dictate crab into the wind and straighten up at the last minute, BUT using the crosswind technique I was taught by the old school tailwheel instructor allows you to handle all the crosswind that a normal human being would want to fly in.

I join those who recommend transition training be done by a Mooney savvy instructor, but if you are experienced at crosswind landing with the technique I described, crosswinds will be nothing new at all and if you can do them in a taildragger, or the same technique in any airplane, you won’t even know there is a crosswind..  You will just put her down.

Landing a Mooney in a crosswind is like anything else with a Mooney.  Just learn the right techniques and go enjoy yourself.  As I recall Mooney indicated that an 11 knot crosswind is not a crosswind in an early model.  I contend that the number is much higher than that if you use the right technique.

There's one thing all the naysayers (concerning your transition from C140 to Mooney) didn't take into account. As someone who started out in a conventional wheeled aircraft you were already well on your way to being a real pilot. 

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  • 2 months later...

Late response to this topic, but I was just reading an article todo with cross winds since I was out yesterday in some (to me) breezy and gusty conditions 18018G24KT, and wanted to do more research into my rusty crosswind landings.  Now, just to be clear, I'm a sniveling coward, so I only went out because I really needed to get my ADS-B flight test done and I had a 10,000' runway oriented at 170 so the actual cross wind was almost 0. (Now ballooning, because of a gust (I hope) ... that was fun ... but this is about cross winds. ) 

Anyway, the article had an interesting suggestion that I hadn't thought of .... 

"Not long after I got my private rating, I learned one other technique for handling very strong crosswinds. It is perfectly legal but rarely considered. It has prevented accidents, yet airport managers sometimes get distressed about it: If the airport has a long enough taxiway that is oriented into the wind, isn’t near buildings or obstructions and there is no one on it, you land on the taxiway. 

As long as there aren’t any people or things to hit, it’s certainly much safer to land on a taxiway that is into the wind than try to land in a crosswind that is so strong you are concerned about your ability to make a safe landing. The Federal Aviation Regulations contain no prohibition against taxiway landings. So long as the landing does not conflict with any other airplanes and there are no people, vehicles or buildings in the immediate vicinity of the touchdown and rollout area, the operation is not careless or reckless, and is far, far safer than losing control of an airplane while landing on a runway. You may never need this tool in your bag, but stick it there, just in case." (Article at Avweb)

  Maybe food for thought.

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On ‎11‎/‎10‎/‎2017 at 10:32 AM, ShuRugal said:

That could be what I was experiencing, but the difference seemed both more abrupt and of greater magnitude than what I am used to.

Of course, 40hrs in the Tecnam vs 8 in the Mooney, could easily be a problem in the seat-to-yoke interface.
 

The greater the wind, the larger the wind reduction in ground effect.  In fact, at ground level, the wind speed must approach zero.  That also means that if you are used to a high-wing aircraft (I'm not sure which Tecnam your experience was in), the low-wing Mooney will see a larger reduction in wind speed on flaring.

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Boy, this is an old issue.  Generally, there is no such thing as a "max crosswind limitation."  Lots of people read the "max demonstrated crosswind component" stated in the POH and think it is a limitation of some kind.  It is not.  In certifying the aircraft, the FAA requires the manufacturer to demonstrate that it can handle a crosswind component of 20% of Vso.  So take the stall speed of your aircraft in the landing configuration, take 20% of that, and if the aircraft could be landed in that as a crosswind component, it passed, it got certified.  If your stall is hypothetically 60 KIAS, then your max demonstrated is 12, its as simple as that.  It does not say anything about what the aircraft is capable of, and is not a limitation.

Now, it is possible for the manufacturer, in the POH, to say that max. demonstrated is a limitation, or to set some other limit.  Some of the old manuals will have "recommended" limits I believe.  But unless the manufacturer stated max. demonstrated as a limitation, it is not a limitation, it is only the crosswind component to which the aircraft had to be subjected during certification to pass.

One way of increasing rudder authority, indeed, all control authority, is to fly faster.  Which is the reason many POH's, mine included, recommend adding a "gust factor" to landing speed when crosswinds are strong.  Works good for me.  I have landed in all kinds of conditions.  What I have found over time, is that if the winds are low, or if they are right down the runway, my aircraft lands nicely at 75 knots.  It plants, and won't balloon or bounce unless I do something unusual.  But landing in high crosswinds, and especially high gusty crosswinds, is an entirely a different deal.  If you get to used to landing at a nice soft speed all the time, and you try that in strong crosswind conditions, you will be in for a rude awakening.  I can vividly recall doing that twice, one a night landing in Gadsden and the other a landing at Marsh Harbour during the day in strong ocean crosswinds, and finding myself just above the runway and suddenly perpendicular to it.  If you don't have airspeed at that point you can't make the correction, so you hope your go around works.  

About once a year I go out and practice landing at 90 kts.  You read that right.  You need to fly the plane right down to the runway surface, no flaps or you will balloon, and fly it onto the tarmac.  When the crosswinds are really strong you need to expect some skittering when the plane starts to slow but is still light on its feet.  I definitely do not recommend it for everyone, especially not someone with low hours just getting started.  But someday you will find yourself with few choices but to make a landing like that.  Mine was 35G54, winds 40 degrees from the runway, long trip, low fuel, no realistic alternate.

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39 minutes ago, David Herman said:

Rule of the thumb for larger jets is to add 1/2 steady state winds + all the gust spread to your approach speed. 

Everything I have flown has been to add 1/2 the gust factor not to exceed 10kts to approach speeds.

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17 hours ago, David Herman said:

True demonstrated is demonstrated - it’s not a limitation ... but there is something called “common sense” and “good sound safe conservative judgement.” I wonder how many pilot’s personal weather minimums not only include visibility and ceiling ... but also wind conditions ar destination?  

I completely agree.  It comes down to good judgment.  My POH does talk about adding the "1/2 the gust" factor and going to half flaps.  I prefer no flaps, works fine.

Edited by jlunseth
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Yes Bob's article is very good. I've read it before but it contains some interesting things.  For example .

"FAR 23.233 under “Directional Stability and Control”. Here is what that regulation states related to crosswinds: 23.322 Directional stability and control A 90 degree cross-­‐component of wind velocity, demonstrated to be safe for taxiing, takeoff and landing must be established and must be not less than 0.2 Vso."

So this says to me that for my M20G (Vso of 61 mph) the minimum crosswind component that it should be able to handle would be .2*61=12.2mph (10.6 kts).  Further Bob goes on and says 

"From this testing, I think you will find a common consensus of test pilot opinion that most Mooneys can be operated in 90 degree crosswinds up to 15 knots with an acceptable level of pilot workload. 15-­‐20 knot crosswinds can be handled, but require a much higher level of pilot proficiency and skill in crosswind landing techniques. 20 knots or above, you should consider finding find another airport to land."

"As with all approaches, optimum approach speed in crosswinds with full flaps is 1.3Vso (stall speed in the landing configuration, gear down and flaps full down). That’s the number generally shown in the Owner’s Manual or Pilot’s Operating Handbook. If there is a higher number shown in the POH, use it. If it’s gusty, add 1⁄2 the gust factor to the approach speed, but no more. Too fast and crosswind landings can become more difficult."

 

 

 

 

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