Airline Safety Report

[0TreeLemur]

23 minutes ago, amillet said:

Although, Al Mooney was self taught and had no engineering degree if I remember correctly 

You are correct, Al did not have an engineering degree.   I think that is really interesting.  

Starting from the Wright Bros. and before, engineering didn't have the information to actually design aircraft from scratch without a lot of experimentation and testing.  In that spirit, Al considered himself a "designer" of aircraft and did a lot of his work with incremental improvements starting from what was known.  The explosion of empirical design data that came out of WWI and mostly WWII made aeronautical engineering possible. 

The pre-J M20's all can trace their legacy back to the pre-engineering era, which explains the need for extensive speed mods to get all the potential out of the pre-J designs.  That said, the pre-J M20's represent a good, 90% solution with many innovative design features. 

Because of its lineage to experimentation rather than strict engineering design, I feel that the Mooney has more "soul" than a more modern clean-sheet, computational fluid dynamics based composite design.  That puts our 1950 design in the same performance arena as much more modern aircraft.