Mooney Humor Continuous Thread

[Stephen]

[Mcstealth]

On 12/15/2019 at 7:57 AM, Geoff said:

It’s not Mooney specific but it’s definitely humorous...

Found in the FBO in Pecos, TX.  Best tamales at any airport.

 

A P51 racer was based in Pecos. I don't remember the name but was there for several years. It is no longer there, though.

[squeaky.stow]

The FF had me curious. In my day two letters on the tail told you what base the fighter was from if you knew what it meant. The Eagle drivers from Langley had FF (First Fighters) on the tail. Vipers from Luke had LF. Tyndal was TY etc. Turns out this FF has an entirely different purpose. Look up Buzz Number in Wikipedia.

[amillet]

On 12/15/2019 at 9:30 AM, Skates97 said:

My wife has wanted a new refrigerator for the last couple of years. Every time it looks like we'll buy one I spend the money on the plane... She refers to different things that have been done on the plane by what they took the place of, "that's the bathroom remodel, that's the refrigerator, etc..."  My answer is "You can't fly the fridge to see the grandchildren."

Here is my new glass panel, picked out by Brenda 

[MooneyMitch]

7 minutes ago, amillet said:

Here is my new glass panel, picked out by Brenda 

Humor can be so sad sometimes....lol   .

Have fun regardless! 

[Stephen]

Santa's sleigh aerodynamics discussion:

 

 

[Jeph357]

2510672242119_415_393_copyImage.bmp

[tmo]

The BMP needs to become a JPEG I think...

[Jeph357]

[Ricky_231]

Just arrived at my friend’s place in NY and this is what I saw when I got off the elevator. Took me a few seconds to understand why they were segregating people based on what type of Mooney they owned...

 

[takair]

On 12/21/2019 at 3:51 PM, amillet said:

Here is my new glass panel, picked out by Brenda 

Well, look at the bright side, you can meet her at Oshkosh with the plane and have a nice place to stay!

[Ned Gravel]

On 12/21/2019 at 3:51 PM, amillet said:

Here is my new glass panel, picked out by Brenda 

Allen:

You are not going to make her drive it all the way to Oshkosh are you?

[amillet]

25 minutes ago, Ned Gravel said:

Allen:

You are not going to make her drive it all the way to Oshkosh are you?

You know Brenda. I can’t make her do anything she doesn’t want to do. 

[Stephen]

What’s the difference between a pizza and a new flight instructor?
...A pizza feeds a family of four!

[bob865]

[DXB]

[A64Pilot]

On 12/15/2019 at 9:05 AM, amillet said:

Interesting formation. Wingmen are stepped up, not down as we are now taught

Curious, who ie we?

I ask as stepping up gets you out of wingtip vortices of the aircraft ahead of you while stepping down down may put you in them as vortices travel down and away.

But I suspect that they are stepped up for the photo.

On helicopters when stacked right I stepped up if real close as if we overlapped rotors I could turn away and rotor separation increased, but we usually stacked level

There are 6 AH-64A’s in this photo, number 6 slid forward to take the pic. It wasn’t choreographed or anything we didn’t even know it was being taken, we were just flying back from a Firepower demo at Ft Sill.

 

Edited February 16 by A64Pilot

[Pinecone]

Step up formation is also used for low level flying.  Therefore if lead does not hit the wires, hill, building, fence, etc, the wingmen also don't hit.

Unless lead flies UNDER the wires.

[Danb]

On 12/21/2019 at 3:51 PM, amillet said:

Here is my new glass panel, picked out by Brenda 

Might be time for a replacement 

D

[A64Pilot]

1 hour ago, Pinecone said:

Step up formation is also used for low level flying.  Therefore if lead does not hit the wires, hill, building, fence, etc, the wingmen also don't hit.

Unless lead flies UNDER the wires.

At night flying with FLIR we would often step down depending on terrain and altitude of lead, reason is it’s far easier to see them in FLIR with the cool sky background.

But as the night hard deck was 50 ft it didn’t leave much room to step down sometimes

We didn’t fly tactical formation close under the thought that one ADA gun could get several of us if we did, but if we had significant separation if lead came under fire his  wing could roll in on the ADA asset. Night system formation was always staggered right because the Helmet Display Unit was over the right eye, and looking left the right eye was to the right of the left eye. That may sound strange but as the right eye was seeing out of the sensor on the nose if you looked right, your right eye was about 10’ to the left of the left eye and that took awhile to get used to, you had a parallax with closer objects 

[Pinecone]

We only used close formation for the traffic pattern and IMC.  As soon as we left the ATA (a while ago) we went to tactical spread of 3000 - 5000 feet lateral.  In the A-10, we were about level with lead.

[A64Pilot]

Army Aviators as a general rule don’t do IMC well, only legal Nav we had for IMC was an ADF, and helicopters are negatively stable in all three axis. We trained in actual IMC in Huey’s in school but Attack anyway usually lost the skill over time. We had an IMC break up plan, we never flew formation IMC in truth I don’t see how it’s possible, I’ve been IMC where I couldn’t see my own wing tips.

They usually pushed Wx harder than they should. I got in the habit at Ft Hood of just committing to IMC and getting down via the GCA approach 

Nowhere else I was stationed had a GCA approach though 

[Pinecone]

I have flown IMC on the wing where all I could see with the glow of the strobe of leads wing tip. And I can't swear that I really had 3 foot wingtip separation.  Might have been a BIT closer.

I would not want to try IMC formation in a helicopter.

[A64Pilot]

We could probably do it using FLIR, our HMD had all the symbology necessary to fly IMC, but our mission just in truth had no use for IMC, in Wx a helicopter is nothing but a slow moving very easy target for ADA. Our only real use for IMC was for recovery if you inadvertently went IMC which could happen easily at night, but as we had no real range and nothing close to a Combat area is going to have an approach our only real hope was to have Terp’d out a recovery approach using GPS, but even then if you go inadvertent IMC in a helicopter the likelyhood of having Wx that you could break out in an approach is almost zero.

I did once hover down thru a ceiling using Symbology generated off of the HARS and doppler RADAR, essentially we could come to a hover “drop” an eight sided symbol in symbology and if you stayed in the box slowly descend, slowly to avoid settling with power. But hovering IMC is difficult, you couldn’t do it without a computer assisting in stability

[AH-1 Cobra Pilot]

On 2/17/2025 at 2:45 PM, A64Pilot said:

Night system formation was always staggered right because the Helmet Display Unit was over the right eye, and looking left the right eye was to the right of the left eye. That may sound strange but as the right eye was seeing out of the sensor on the nose if you looked right, your right eye was about 10’ to the left of the left eye and that took awhile to get used to, you had a parallax with closer objects 

A guy told a funny story about that.  In AH-64 training, he and the other students would always feel really sick after clearing the tail while still on the ground and under the hood.  (Since your vision came through the optics mounted on the nose, turning you head from 180^o to -180^o was very disorienting.)  The instructor had a display showing where the student's helmet was facing, so if you did not clear the tail, you would get cussed out, and you still had to do it.  One day, his buddy came in saying he had figured it out.  "You just close your eyes, move your head from all the way back-right to all the way back-left then forward, and then you can open your eyes!"