I flew the Mooney down to San Diego yesterday to park it in my hanger. For those of you that don’t know, I have it up for sale. This was possibly my last flight in my baby. My plane has been a big part of my life for the past 3+ years. I have accumulated nearly 700 hours of flight time in it and had a blast flying all over the US. I have made a number of great friends and learned more than I would have ever guessed.

Me flying past Mt. Shasta – 2003:

Anyway, I had not really thought about how much I loved that plane till I was flying down near Long Beach. I started remembering flying to Oregon with my buddy Justin, flying to Sun River to stay with Chuck and his family, flying around Mt. Shasta, altitude tests with Jeff Young, taking my parents for their first flight, flying to the Mooney PPP in Tucson and at the Mooney PPP in San Diego, numerous trips to LA for Laker games, numerous trips to Las Vegas to visit with my family, etc. etc. etc. All of a sudden, the song November rain started playing on my iPod and I really began to realize how much I am going to miss my baby

Me and my dad at Santa Monica getting ready to fly to Las Vegas – 2003:

Anyway, I got down to San Diego, parked the airplane, got everything I wanted to keep out of the plane, and closed it up in the hanger. I then went over to the FAA FSDO for my last San Diego Aviation Safety Counselor meeting. The Aviation Safety Counselors are a group of volunteers who work with the FAA to help promote aviation safety. We have monthly meetings and put on at least one big event a year–the Super Safety Seminar–which draws close to 600 local pilots for a day of safety-related seminars. I have been a member of the San Diego group for the last 2+ years and really gotten to know a lot of the other counselors well. I was elected to the board for a 2 year term, and was elected by the board to serve as treasurer. I have spent a lot of time with the group and I was very sad to say good bye. At the end of the meeting, the president and everyone present gave me a big thank you for my work over the past few years which made me feel very good. Thank you all very much as well for your efforts towards safer flying, and for being such great flying-buddies….I will miss you all.

I got a ride back to LA from another Mooney guy in San Diego who we will just refer to as Larry T. This was a great example of how NOT to fly. Larry T. started off as being very abusive to his plane. He tossed the keys onto the wing-walk, he let the tow bar slam into the cowl flap, and he was generally rough when handling the plane. This showed as his plane was not a good looking 231 at all.

Larry T’s 231:

The biggest thing I have to take issue with, however, is Larry T. being constantly behind EVERYTHING. He showed up 40 minutes late (and thus didn’t have the plane preflighted, fueled, or ready to go at all). He then stood around while waiting for the fuel truck only to do what vaguely resembled a preflight as they put fuel into the plane (no way to call it a thorough preflight at all). He then added barely enough fuel to make it to Santa Monica and back. He waited till we were both in the plane to clean the dirty windshield making us both get out. He didn’t have any of the charts out. He didn’t have any of the frequencies programmed in before he needed to change them. He didn’t have any backups setup in advance in case of a failure (I can only imagine what he would have to do if his GPS failed while IMC). He was behind the ENTIRE time.

He had a very nice panel containing a Garmin 430 GPS, an Apollo GPS (GX60 I think), a Garmin GMA-340 audio panel, storm scope, Apollo Comm/Nav 2, HSI, Autopilot, Bose headsets….the only problem being that he didn’t know how to use the equipment well. When we started up, my headset had good volume coming from the radios, but the inter-comm volume was low. When I went to adjust it on the GMA-340, he quickly snapped and said that he didn’t want me to touch anything in the plane (talk about an ego and not using all available resources….but I can live with that). The thing is that he then didn’t know how to do it himself and refused my help. We thus spent the entire flight in near silence as I couldn’t hear a word he said.

His actual flying wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good. He was very ham fisted and constantly jerked the plane around. Every time he looked right to adjust a radio, the plane banked 20 degrees right. He would then compensate by banking 20 degrees left. It was like Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. Larry T. also had problems in pitch. He only used the electric trim and refused to use the manual trim wheel. While this might work in other planes, it does not work at all in a Mooney. The electric trim is too sensitive so you get excessive pitch motions every time you flick the switch. Well….Larry T. did this throughout the flight making a not so smooth ride even less smooth.

Lastly, Larry T. just seemed to be overloaded by the plane. This was most pronounced during the approach phase of the flight. He didn’t comply with instructions from the tower. While level on base, I tried to tell him to turn off the runway towards the north side of the field so that we wouldn’t have to taxi back across it after we had stopped. This, however, was too much information for Larry T. to handle while flying. We then turned base and Larry T. flew through the final approach course. To compensate, he rolled into a 50 degree bank to get back to final. For those of you that don’t fly, executing sharp extreme maneuvers while close to the ground at slow airspeeds is not the safest thing to do.

The touchdown was average. Larry T. rounded out a bit high so there was a slight thumping down, but nothing too bad. The strange thing was, however, that he added power after we touched down. This caused us to take FOREVER to slow down to a speed that would allow us to turn off the runway. This was not appropriate as the tower had previously asked us not to spend much time on the runway as there was an IFR departure holding in position on the runway behind us.

For a pilot with over 2500 hours of Mooney flight time over 30+ years (I have around 700 hours), I would rate the flight a 3 out of 10. The flight made me thankful for the great training I received from my instructor Chuck McGill of Safe Flight Intl. It really makes a difference when you fly not just with someone who knows how to fly well, but who knows how to fly well while keeping their passengers comfortable. I made it back to Santa Monica, but it was not fun.

You can view all the photos in the Bye Bye Mooney gallery.