If you had a $350K budget, which Mooney would you aim for and why?

[woodb01]

I am a noob here so please don't flame the post for any trespass of decorum. I have a job that requires routine travel, and frequently to places where there are only smaller regional airports. It is fairly normal to be 500-800nm in any one direction and I am in the cold Midwest. The central location is nice because I can go East or West. At this point a lot of the sales and delivery work are in the Northeast.

We are looking at a second place in Texas or Tennessee so still fairly "central" in the US as a home base. My missions would usually be 1, but on occasion 2 or 3 passengers. Depending on the client, the project, or the sales opportunity. It could be a Monday through Thursday (occasionally Friday), or, when it is sales related it may be 1 or 2 days. I have been looking at the K (252), M, and R models. Any thoughts on the best bird and why? Or, if you would choose a different model what is the reason with those mission parameters?

Edited October 2, 2023 by woodb01

[1980Mooney]

3 hours ago, woodb01 said:

I am a noob here so please don't flame the post for any trespass of decorum. I have a job that requires routine travel, and frequently to places where there are only smaller regional airports. It is fairly normal to be 500-800nm in any one direction and I am in the cold Midwest. The central location is nice because I can go East or West. At this point a lot of the sales and delivery work are in the Northeast.

We are looking at a second place in Texas or Tennessee so still fairly "central" in the US as a home base. My missions would usually be 1, but on occasion 2 or 3 passengers. Depending on the client, the project, or the sales opportunity. It could be a Monday through Thursday (occasionally Friday), or, when it is sales related it may be 1 or 2 days. I have been looking at the K (252), M, and R models. Any thoughts on the best bird and why? Or, if you would choose a different model what is the reason with those mission parameters?

Since you will need reliable dispatch Monday- Friday in the "cold Midwest" and destination now mainly in the "cold" Northeast, you will need a plane with FIKI - flight into known icing.  The system includes dual alternator, dual pumps, fluid alone weighs 54 lbs. (6 gal x 9 lbs)  That adds about 92 lbs. weight per @LANCECASPER -

The turbocharged 252 and M will have an O2 bottle adding about 40-50 lbs.

Your mission requires you to occasionally fly 3 passengers ... 800 nm.....I assume luggage. 

If you have 4 males on board - let's assume 200 lbs each (and that may be an underestimate now days) - add 100 lbs luggage.  WITHOUT ANY FUEL, you will be near or above useful load of most Mooney's with FIKI.

I have a hard time seeing how this fits your mission.  Any one of the 3 Mooney's will be fine for pilot and 1 pax.  Your other 2 collogues will have to fly commercial or drive.

  

[woodb01]

27 minutes ago, 1980Mooney said:

Since you will need reliable dispatch Monday- Friday in the "cold Midwest" and destination now mainly in the "cold" Northeast, you will need a plane with FIKI - flight into known icing.  The system includes dual alternator, dual pumps, fluid alone weighs 54 lbs. (6 gal x 9 lbs)  That adds about 92 lbs. weight per @LANCECASPER -

The turbocharged 252 and M will have an O2 bottle adding about 40-50 lbs.

Your mission requires you to occasionally fly 3 passengers ... 800 nm.....I assume luggage. 

If you have 4 males on board - let's assume 200 lbs each (and that may be an underestimate now days) - add 100 lbs luggage.  WITHOUT ANY FUEL, you will be near or above useful load of most Mooney's with FIKI.

I have a hard time seeing how this fits your mission.  Any one of the 3 Mooney's will be fine for pilot and 1 pax.  Your other 2 collogues will have to fly commercial or drive.

  

Thank you for the feedback. My mistake on the number of passengers. It would only ever be a total of 3 "full size" adults, including myself, the pilot. In other words, I doubt I would ever have butts in all 4 seats. Could it happen? Sure, but with a full contingent it wouldn't be likely to have much luggage because it would be a short term trip.

Edited October 2, 2023 by woodb01

[Pinecone]

I don't see the O2 system adding 50 pounds.  In my plane, it is a kevlar wrapped 115 cf tank, that weighs about 17 pounds.

I have a 252 upgraded to Encore specs, with O2, but not TKS, I have a 1119 pound useful load.   So 3x 200 pounds of people, 150 pounds for TKS with fluid, there is still 350 pounds for fuel and luggage.  In the mid teens, I do about 175 KTAS at 10 GPH.  I have a upcoming flight that is 550 nm, it flight plans at 3 hours 11 minutes and 42 gallons.  So take off with about 50 gallons, would leave you 50 pounds for luggage.

Obviously, with only 2 people, you could carry 200 more fuel/luggage

[Z W]

All of those models have similar performance numbers.  The M may be a little faster than the K, while being slightly less efficient on fuel.  The R will lack the capability of a turbocharger, but may cost less to maintain.  They're all 160-185 knot machines, depending on how you fly them, with useful loads between 850 and 1100 lbs, give or take.

They all may be (rarely) available with TKS de-ice, but you don't want to be flying in ice in any Mooney on purpose.

Your on-a-schedule, go in all weather, 3 adults, and 500-800nm plan may be better suited for a twin or something that burns Jet-A.  That business mission is traditionally filled by a cabin class piston twin (Cessna 300/400-series, Baron 55/58, Piper Seneca) or a turboprop (Piper Meridian, King Air) of some kind.  That will generally require a larger budget, both for purchase and operations.

Mooneys are wonderful machines but you'll be stretching the capabilities of any piston single aircraft to do what you describe.  

[LANCECASPER]

Mooney’s slogan back in the 90’s, especially for the Bravo, was “the Personal Airliner”, with the emphasis on “personal”. These are great one to two person airplanes that in most good-weather, regional situations will beat the airlines. If all you were trying to do is just use your airplane once in awhile to make a good weather trip instead of taking the airlines I think that would be fine.

However, where you would get in trouble in this scenario is if you really have to be somewhere. In that situation people tend to let that “need” override marginal weather, gross weight, etc. If you are going to use aviation for the business situation you describe, flying a lot to the Northeast (think “Great Lakes” kinda icing) it is best to do it with a fully FIKI two piston engine or one turbine engine aircraft, flown by someone who didn’t just have a long day of work and a lot on their mind. That would be a budget of $750K - $1 million plus the expenses that go with the class of aircraft. If you describe to your insurance agent the situation you mentioned above  (flying employees and clients)  it’s unlikely the company would want to underwrite that.

[Rmnpilot]

@woodb01, I am cold upper Midwest based and fly a tks equipped bravo.  My mission is basically the same as yours.   I travel almost every week somewhere in the US and while I prefer to use the Mooney, the airlines get a significant chunk of my funds as well. I don’t fly with anyone else 95% of the time and avoid icing.   They are great aircraft. Just be sure to respect them, your ability and the weather.  

[woodb01]

2 hours ago, Rmnpilot said:

@woodb01, I am cold upper Midwest based and fly a tks equipped bravo.  My mission is basically the same as yours.   I travel almost every week somewhere in the US and while I prefer to use the Mooney, the airlines get a significant chunk of my funds as well. I don’t fly with anyone else 95% of the time and avoid icing.   They are great aircraft. Just be sure to respect them, your ability and the weather.  

All great input and your use sounds almost exactly like mine. Like you, with the exception of sales calls I can take an airline seat when needed. The airlines are just a huge time suck and hassle with the significant amount more time needed for lengthy drives and rental cars. It isn't unusual for my drive from an airliner friendly airport to be 1.5 - 2.5 hours. I even had a recent client in Reading PA where the client is literally across the street from the regional airport. Like walking distance across the street. For the airlines it is a 2 hour drive each way to and from PHL, plus the airline security time, plus travel time on both of them, plus rental car time, eats up an entire day for an in and out trip. 

Edited October 2, 2023 by woodb01

[Rmnpilot]

11 minutes ago, woodb01 said:

All great input and your use sounds almost exactly like mine. Like you, with the exception of sales calls I can take an airline seat when needed. The airlines are just a huge time suck and hassle with the significant amount more time needed for lengthy drives and rental cars. It isn't unusual for my drive from an airliner friendly airport to be 1.5 - 2.5 hours. I even had a recent client in Reading PA where the client is literally across the street from the regional airport. Like walking distance across the street. For the airlines it is a 2 hour drive each way to and from PHL, plus the airline security time, plus travel time on both of them, plus rental car time, eats up an entire day for an in and out trip. 

@woodb01 I don’t want to come across as pessimistic, but understand even with your customers being far away from airline served airports, you still need to find a rental car or Uber in podunk USA.   It’s not as straight forward.   I’ve had to take a local taxi to my customer, then find out I’m stuck due to weather.  So another taxi to a mom and pop hotel that’s within walking distance of something resembling a meal, etc.    I’ve also had where there is no rental car or crew car so you need to think about how you will get to and from.   
I typically have work that lasts from 1 day to 3 weeks on site.  Do I leave the plane outside in northern maine for weeks on end in February?   Pay for a hangar?   
I recently had a trip east that I had planned to fly there and back same day.  I beat the weather heading east but it grew to a significant line as the day continued.  I couldn’t go north or south to get around and surely couldn’t get over 40,000 feet so again it’s a hurry up and wait.  
I thoroughly enjoy the plane and the flexibility it gives me with my travels.  At the end of the day it’s a means of transportation and I respect that it can’t do it all. 

[JayMatt]

I love Mooney, don't get me wrong, but if I had that budget and mission I wouldn't be flying a Mooney. I'd probably go with a  Columbia 400 or a Lancair IV-P.  I fly 4 adults a decent amount of times but it's interesting. Mooney is an amazing "economical" plane but not what I would choose as daily driver. 

[woodb01]

3 hours ago, JayMatt said:

I love Mooney, don't get me wrong, but if I had that budget and mission I wouldn't be flying a Mooney. I'd probably go with a  Columbia 400 or a Lancair IV-P.  I fly 4 adults a decent amount of times but it's interesting. Mooney is an amazing "economical" plane but not what I would choose as daily driver. 

I have considered (and am still considering) the Cessna 400. My limited understanding is that Cessna is based on the Lancair. However, while I've considered the Lancair I do have concerns with the home built experimental aircraft at that speed. My biggest worry is not the aircraft but finding a mechanic with enough experience, knowledge, skill, and time to do a thorough enough review. And at the speed of the Lancair (which is a large temptation), it isn't just normal pre-buy checks or inspections, it is things like checking how true and how square the wings / fuselage, and winglets (if equipped) are. From what I understand, without the wiglets stalls generate a flat spin that is nearly impossible to recover from. Done lots of homework there and while the speed and capability is enticing there are a lot of downside safety concerns I have.

Edited October 2, 2023 by woodb01

[Danb]

TKS installed in a Bravo GX 

[Utah20Gflyer]

If I had 350k and wanted a really capable traveling machine I’d look at the Piper Malibu.  That would put you at the bottom end of that market but the Malibu has the trifecta of Turbocharged, FIKI and pressurization (also A/C which is nice)   Being a 6 place you can effectively use it with 4 adults on real missions.  Operating costs are going to be higher than a turbo Mooney but your dispatch rate will be higher as it fits a wider variety of mission profiles. 
 

The Malibu was a clean sheet design meant to incorporate all the systems for a real traveling machine which is why it still has a 1200lb+ useful load with all the systems you would want.  When you load up a Mooney with those systems and some fuel to get somewhere they become 1-2 person airplanes.  
 

Ultimately the question is how much money are you willing to trade for a higher dispatch rate.  My G model Mooney with a nice IFR panel would probably give you a 65 percent dispatch rate, a turbo Mooney with FIKI maybe 80 percent, a Malibu maybe 95 percent( numbers were pulled out of my rear end)  The costs are probably 20k a year for my G model. 40k for a turbo Mooney, 60k for a Malibu.   The costs go up a lot faster than the dispatch rate.   The numbers are obviously not anything near exact but I believe the relationship between cost and utility are correct.  

[LANCECASPER]

On 10/2/2023 at 10:29 AM, woodb01 said:

I have considered (and am still considering) the Cessna 400. My limited understanding is that Cessna is based on the Lancair. However, while I've considered the Lancair I do have concerns with the home built experimental aircraft at that speed. My biggest worry is not the aircraft but finding a mechanic with enough experience, knowledge, skill, and time to do a thorough enough review. And at the speed of the Lancair (which is a large temptation), it isn't just normal pre-buy checks or inspections, it is things like checking how true and how square the wings / fuselage, and wing tips (if equipped) are. From what I understand, without the wing-tips stalls generate a flat spin that is nearly impossible to recover from. Done lots of homework there and while the speed and capability is enticing there are a lot of downside safety concerns I have.

Insurance is almost impossible on a Lancair IV experimental. I checked ten years ago and If you could jump through all of the hoops back then to get it, it would have been well over $10,000 - and the insurance market was very soft back then. Since then more have crashed. These were all made by people of differing skills and attention to detail since they were owner-made. No doubt some were incredibly well-built, but the insurance company will make you get an inspection report before they will cover you.  Some have later had the winglets installed which lowers the stall speed and helps, but overall, the accident/fatality rate is atrocious.

 Coming up on thirty years ago Lancair wanted to take their experimental and certify it, and really when it was all said and done, completely designed a new airplane under a new company name (Pacific Aviation Composites then later called Columbia Aircraft)

The Columbia 350/400, Cessna 350/400 or Cessna TTX airplanes do have some good qualities but are very expensive to maintain (easily twice as expensive as a Mooney, and in many cases much more than that) and there are only a handful of people around the country really qualified to maintain them. There are owners that love them and I once considered one, but IMO the Mooney is a much better long-term airplane. As composites age and are kept in different climates, etc., the predictability of how they will hold up is not as good as what we know about Mooneys. Some of them have the Therma-wing de-ice and it’s hard to say how much that heat will affect the leading edges on the composites on these and the Cirrus.

If you bought a Columbia/Cessna 350/400 G1000 and now want WAAS I believe you are completely out of luck on that since the original was never sold with WAAS. (It would be good to research and verify that.) Then when Cessna later certified the TTX with the G1000 they went with the Garmin Perspective (which they called Intrinzic) which is not backwards compatible.

You would also think that the insurance would be less since it is a fixed gear airplane - but not so since repair costs after an incident/accident are so high.

You have probably already read about how when Cessna moved composite production from Oregon to Mexico that the humidity and heat caused disbonding issues. Is that just a sample of what will happen down the road as the composites age in the other “non-affected” airplanes? Time will tell. The only one I would ever consider would be a late production “Cessna” TTx since a lot of lessons have been learned from the early 2000’s to when Cessna stopped production of the TTX, plus Cessna (Textron) is a huge company and has been decent about keeping their fleet flying. Having done some research though, and having talked to people who know a lot more than I do about these airplanes, I have stayed away from them.

Before the airplane market got crazy you could buy a nicely equipped 400 for not much over $200,000. Once things got crazy people were paying way too much (nearly double that amount) for them, so I would hate to be the one who had overpaid once the market regains sanity. If an airplane is bought correctly, if you factor the cost of buying  the airplane and then factor in the proceeds when you sell it, the purchase price is not the expensive part of airplane ownership - it is the yearly cost of housing it, feeding it, insuring it and maintaining it.

[StevieDee]

On 10/2/2023 at 9:24 AM, Utah20Gflyer said:

If I had 350k and wanted a really capable traveling machine I’d look at the Piper Malibu.  That would put you at the bottom end of that market but the Malibu has the trifecta of Turbocharged, FIKI and pressurization (also A/C which is nice)   Being a 6 place you can effectively use it with 4 adults on real missions.  Operating costs are going to be higher than a turbo Mooney but your dispatch rate will be higher as it fits a wider variety of mission profiles. 
 

The Malibu was a clean sheet design meant to incorporate all the systems for a real traveling machine which is why it still has a 1200lb+ useful load with all the systems you would want.  When you load up a Mooney with those systems and some fuel to get somewhere they become 1-2 person airplanes.  
 

Ultimately the question is how much money are you willing to trade for a higher dispatch rate.  My G model Mooney with a nice IFR panel would probably give you a 65 percent dispatch rate, a turbo Mooney with FIKI maybe 80 percent, a Malibu maybe 95 percent( numbers were pulled out of my rear end)  The costs are probably 20k a year for my G model. 40k for a turbo Mooney, 60k for a Malibu.   The costs go up a lot faster than the dispatch rate.   The numbers are obviously not anything near exact but I believe the relationship between cost and utility are correct.  

The Malibu is so overshadowed by its turboprop big brothers that it rarely receives mention across the Internet these days.  It checks all the boxes that you mentioned.  It also has good range, better than the Meridian.  The main reason why I don’t go for it is because I’m 6’2” and getting to the pilot seat is a Houdini act for me.  I would also not necessarily trust the single piston engine to climb through the ice.

Edited October 5, 2023 by Stephen De Klerk