Story of the Mooney PREDATOR

[0TreeLemur]

Stumbled upon this article on the interwebs this evening.   Thought I would share it.

Who wants one?

https://sanangelolive.com/news/business/2023-05-01/predator-flies-san-angelo

[mike_elliott]

When I was at Maxwells last week, Paul mentioned he was going to a Mooney caravan clinic down there while he was messing around with the predator over the weekend. wx was a bit iffy, so I assumed it didn't happen

 

[Montreal]

That's awesome. I last saw it with a blue tarp thrown over the top... glad they finished. 

[PT20J]

One of the issues with the Predator was roll rate. Mooneys are not spritely in that respect. In order to meet the requirements of the program, Mooney cut back the flaps and increased the span of the ailerons. The ailerons tended to float up at high speeds due to the lower pressure on the top of the wing and this put the push-pull tubes in compression and caused them to flex enough to bind. Roger Hoh is a handling qualities engineer that was called in to look into this (I was currently working with him on a simulator program I was involved with at the time) but there was no easy fix. Roger told me that when he flew it at high speed the stick would stay pretty much where you put it with no tendency to return to neutral.

Recently when I was in Longview, I asked Don about it and he said that they never flew it with the modified wing but instead put a M20K wing on it since they happened to have one handy. 

So this is a Predator with a lot of modifications. Still pretty cool though.

Skip

[carusoam]

IIRC…. Paul had mentioned the wing swap…

I’m sure the Predator is still awesome…

But, I would prefer the Bravo version for some reason… 

 

Nice to see the plane out and about!

and it’s story somewhat intact.

Flying formation with a canopy must be cool!

Bets regards,

-a-

[carusoam]

And the Mooney Museum….   

Best regards,

-a-