I recently met another cool Mooney pilot, Dave Morris, who flys a Mooney M20A. My Mooney is an M20C. Dave's has wood wings, and mine doesn't. He loves his wood wing and the smooth speed and performance of Mooneys. His card has the quote of the subject of this blog entry. It made me laugh when I first saw it. Dave has that effect on people. This entry isn't about Dave, though, it's about Mooney pilots.
We love to fly fast. Some airplanes are about landing in remote mountain grass strips or along the banks of a river, or in a field. Mooneys are about speed. I feel the need for speed. Everything about them is fast. All we talk about is how we have modified our planes for speed. Some have added a new windshield that is sleeker. Or the engine cowling I put on got me 6 extra knots of speed. Those flap gap seals sure improved my cruising speed. It goes on forever and forever, and it makes us love our Mooneys more. Let's face it, Mooneys even look fast just sitting on the ramp.
We love to fly fast. Some airplanes are about landing in remote mountain grass strips or along the banks of a river, or in a field. Mooneys are about speed. I feel the need for speed. Everything about them is fast. All we talk about is how we have modified our planes for speed. Some have added a new windshield that is sleeker. Or the engine cowling I put on got me 6 extra knots of speed. Those flap gap seals sure improved my cruising speed. It goes on forever and forever, and it makes us love our Mooneys more. Let's face it, Mooneys even look fast just sitting on the ramp.
We measure our mods in "knots". That mod I did on my Mooney got me 3 extra knots of speed. The truth is two-fold. Some mods don't give us any speed advantage, but just look cool. Other mods give us a speed improvement, but I think you need to multiply all pilot estimates of speed improvements by 50% to get the actual improvement. It's kind of like the big fish that got away to a fisherman.
The truth is that what we love most about our Mooneys is intangible. It feels so good when you taxi onto the runway and add takeoff power. The Mooney accelerates so quickly and wants to takeoff, sometimes before she should. But there are two truths about a Mooney. It will not takeoff before it has the right airspeed and won't land until it doesn't. Those skinny laminar flow wings and slippery fuselage demand that the pilot land at the right airspeed. If you try to land going too fast, even by a few knots, then you may end up landing in the next county. It just wants to keep flying, like most of her pilots.
The other thing Mooney pilots like to brag about is how fast they fly on so little fuel. And to be honest, Mooneys are one of the most efficient aircraft ever built regarding speed and fuel economy. But just like speed, we tend to exaggerate the fuel economy. You will often hear, "I flew here on 8.3 gallons per hour (GPH). The next pilot says, "I got here on 7.9 gph. If you keep going, some Mooney pilot will land with more fuel than he/she took off with. It's just the lore of Mooneys and their pilots.
So when you go to a fly-in, you will often hear a pilot claim, I got here in 2 hours, but if I were flying a Cessna, I would have had to leave yesterday. I guess you just have to love those magnificent pilots and their flying Mooney machines.
