The Legend of Al Mooney - Video

[NickG]

LOLOL! Thanks @Pembroke Advisor - Al Mooney was 7' 1" and wore a top hat while flying....

 

[Bartman]

OMG I’ve watched it twice and I am still laughing !

[dkkim73]

This is wonderful. Funniest thing in a while. 

BTW did the Comanche actually use a Mooney airfoil? Everything in that was surely factual.

[IvanP]

Made my day better....thanks for sharing.

[Hank]

  On 3/31/2025 at 3:43 AM, dkkim73 said:

BTW did the Comanche actually use a Mooney airfoil? Everything in that was surely factual.

Expand  

There's a story that Al parked an M20 overnight while visiting Piper Field  (I forget why), and a slew of engineers crawled all over it seeing how things were done. He may have been taken out to dinner, and put up for the night. Then the Comanche was introduced. 

I was surprised that the overhead shot of a "Mooney" taking off from a grass field had such a long ground run, and was still on the ground when the scene changed; then was further surprised on two other shots taking off from a paved runway where the gear stayed down for a long time before moving up s-l-o-o-o-w-l-l-y-y-y, but it was apparently a groundhog of a Comanche with that awful, fragile hydraulic gear transmission. 

Other than that, everything else was true, except for his comment abiut the Comanche tail being "the right way around," which we all know is facing the wrong direction . . . .

I haven't seen much of Bryan-with-a-Y since the muttonheads on POA ran me off. I'll have to start looking for him on YouTube. 

[Falcon Man]

Funny video!

Piper copied Mooney in some areas.

Comanche wing airfoil is a NACA 64920-A215 the entire wing length, rectangular wing shape. M20 wing airfoil is NACA 63-215 wing root and  NACA 64-412 at the tip, tapered wing shape.

Last two digits in the NACA 6 series designation are relative thickness of the airfoil so while Al Mooney decided to use a thinner (12%) airfoil at the wingtip, Piper team decided 15% would do, resulting in greater drag and showing constant pressure rise and gentle stall characteristic desirable for training aircraft. (Info from a previous post).

[Flyler]

  On 3/31/2025 at 4:51 AM, Hank said:

 

Other than that, everything else was true, except for his comment abiut the Comanche tail being "the right way around," which we all know is facing the wrong direction . . . .

Expand  

When copying the plans, they accidentally put the tail on backwards, thereby cancelling out the fact that the plans accidentally had the tail on backwards.  The rest is history...