Mooney F & 201/J Models...

Rob,

Funny you should post this, I have been thinking about an M20J also. Great airplane, low fuel burn for the speed you get, maintenance is not too bad (if the plane has been taken care of). There was an on-line buyers guide to Mooney aircraft that I can't seem to find now, but I will pass it along when I do find it. From what I remember the J is better than the F, and for what you want to do, I don't think the added expense of purchase, turbocharging (i.e. maintenance costs, higher fuel burn etc) isn't worth a 252 etc....Wikipedia has a pretty good model break down, and like I said, when I find the buyers/owners guide I will pass it along.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mooney_M20

http://www.mooneypilots.com/

http://www.mooneyland.com/index.html

 

Rob,

If you like glass cockpits so much check if there is a retrofit package. Don't know about bug smashers but in the jet world there are all sorts of STC packages for upgrades available.

Jeff

 

I shopped for a bunch of Mooneys before settling on my old crate. All of them have some amount of fuel leakage which is pretty pricey to repair right. You can have the tanks sloshed with a sealer, but I've heard it doesn't last more than a few years. Bladders are an option. Other issues I kept finding(well hidden, in many cases) was a gear up landing. If any F model has the belly mod and other mods it's a good bet it was due to a gear up.

I've always found them constraining. It's not that they are too small per-se, but the seating is low and the windows don't go very high into the roof line. It make the plane 'feel' small, although the cabin is similar in size to my Bonanza. Kind of a claustrophobic symptom, which I don't feel in many other planes.

They are fast, but also tend to run hot. There are several ADs on the engine that could prove to be costly, but I'm really not up on the details, just check into it before signing. The other drawback is the poor intake air design. Mooney calls the 'ram inlet' a performance boost, but it's really a band-aid for a poorly designed air intake to start with. You get unfiltered air that adds about 1/2" of MP or so at high throttle settings.

I would have been very happy with a M20F if I could find one that wasn't too badly kept up. All the one's in my price range were rough looking and had 'history'.

 

I was in exactly the same place at one point.

When I was looking to buy an airplane (in 1980) I looked seriously at the M20J, the Turbo Arrow and the 182RG. Which one you buy will depend on what you want to do with it. The Mooney looks good on paper, but it didn't have nearly the useful load of the 182RG (300 pounds less!) and it didn't carry as much fuel. With full tanks, the Mooney will carry about 600 pounds, the RG will carry 800. The Mooney didn't burn quite as much, but if you plotted out a payload/range graph, the RG kills the Mooney. If you want to fill the seats, the tanks and go, the RG is the airplane, that higher useful load gets the job done. Also the RG has a derated 6 cylinder engine where the Mooney has a 200hp 4. The result is that the RG climbs a lot better (because it has more power), but cruises about 8 kts slower (I know what the books say, but the RG's cruise speed numbers were conservative, we found the speed differences weren't as big as the book numbers said, and comparably loaded the speed difference is small). The Mooney is smaller inside, but it is lighter on the controls and it looks sexier on the ramp. The RG is a more stable, solid, instrument platform than the Mooney, it has heavier controls in pitch and roll, but it is kinda nice to have that heavier feel when you are in the clouds.

The clincher for me was when the guy selling me the airplane told me "hey, I am a dealer for all three, and I'll sell you whatever you want, but here's the deal. When I sell a Turbo Arrow I always ask the customer "where do you want the bricks delivered?". I said "what will I need bricks for?" He said "if you have a Turbo Arrow, the engine is going to be out of it so often that we just like to keep a stack of bricks near so we don't have to hunting for them evey time we pull the engine!" The TArrow had that Conti 6 that was a maintenace disaster. Finally he said, "The Mooney is a fine airplane, but the maintenance on the Mooney is going to be higer than the RG." He noted that it takes a half an hour to take the cowling off of a Mooney, and on the RG it takes about 20 seconds. He was also my A&P so I took his word on it and bought the RG and never looked back. For what I was doing, flying long distances with 4 seats full, there was no question that was the right choice for me.

BTW I put a set of "Flight Bonus" strut cuffs, a DME antenna cover, improved the cowling sealing and did a few other "Lopresti" kind of mods like flap and alieron seals, headlight covers, and such and ended up crusing at 175kts at 7,000 ft. A friend had an M20J and my airplane was a few knots faster, I know because we raced once and I could very slowly pull away from his M20J. I could reguarly fly non-stop from Toledo Ohio to South Florida, crusing at 12k ft at 168 kts true up there burning 11gph.

So, like I said, look at what you want to do with the airplane. If you don't have the need for the higher payload, then a nice M20J may fit the bill. If you want to carry the load and go almost as fast the RG gets the nod.

 

You owned the fasted(by far) 182RG on the planet. IIRC the redline on the 182RG was 172-ish Kts, but I'm not an expert on the Cessna brand by a long shot. Those must have been some magic mods.........

 

All things being equal...you should get a 201 over an F. You should get an Ovation over a 201. (It's worth it. I was flying formation w/ one in a C310R. I called center and asked how fast I was gaining on the Ovation. He said..."He's pulling away from you sir"). For my money...the Ovation is Mooney's first true departure from the rest of the Mooney pack since 1962....I've never found any difference in any of 'em. (They're everyone of them cramped, economical, and fly terrible...until the Ovation). The J will be a little faster than the F.

*IF* you're looking for glass and thinkin' of stretching $...

I've got an '06 G36 Bonanza. Garmin G1000 w/ skywatch (35k option). Nothing but 2 flat screen's on the whole panel. Same a/p and f/d as new king airs. mid (to low?) 400K's

(I believe I can get you 95 to 100 percent financing on this plane thru my banker). Or...

'74 F33A. Zero since "Ultimate" major. Gami, 3'blade, FCS 810 FD/ap 430 and kln90B (2 IFR Nav's) New Leather and New "Jet-Glow" paint. I think I know about what you're thinkin' you'll pay for a J Rob. You may be suprised at how much more airplane you can get in an F33A with just a little more $$.

Have you ever flown a Bonanza Rob? If not...you owe it to yourself before making a decision. (esp. if you plan on doing much xc at all).

(fwiw...I just sold a J for $55k w/ 1600 smoh. light on radios, but gorgeous paint/int. They do have their cult following...so who am I to argue? ).

keep us posted!

 

If you like Ferrari's...the Ovation is worth the 150k more imvho. IF you like miata's, go with the F or J

If you like F430's...go with a Bonanza.

 

When the airplane was stock I did some cross country air racing with it and consistently did very well, they gave you an index speed and that was based on the manufacturers numbers and I could motor past a lot of airplanes that had faster indexs. When a 182 RG is light, it trims nose down, and when it does, the airflow improves over the open gear wells, which reduces the drag further. That's why it was a popular airplane for that type of racing. The book numbrers are based on gross weight cruise, and if you are light it is a good bit faster.

With the mods, I couldn't open the throttle at 6500 feet in level flight. If I did, I had to roll in all of the nose down trim and the airplane would climb until until the power went away (to like 7000 feet or so). If you held a little bit of nose down pressure at max cruise power (at 6500 ft) the airplane would cruise right above the top of the green arc. If you were above 7500 ft the IAS was a little lower and it trued right at 175. The only drawback to the mods was it was hard to slow the airplane down, you had to really think ahead and get the power off early so that you could get down to 140 IAS and get the gear down. If you didn't the gear horn would be squawking at you because you had to pull the throttle back to idle to get it into the pattern.

Most light aircraft respond quite amazingly to clean up mods. The stuff that Lopresti did at Mooney is pretty much the standard thing, NACA (the forerunner of NASA) did a series of cleanup tests during the war and found that if you did a number of small mods the net result was a pretty startling inmpovement in overall performance. There wasn't any one thing that made a big difference, but the sum total of the mods make a huge difference. As I recall, the strut cuffs were a biggie, I think I got five knots out of them, the alieron and flap seals were worth about 3 knots, and some of the others weren't really measurable by themselves, but by the time I was done I had made an improvement of about 12 knots over the stock airplane, which was pretty amazing. I had to extend the cowl flaps since at the higher speed I couldn't keep the engine warm at altitude, and that also provided a couple of knots, along with spinner seals and stuff like that. As I did the mods I ran back to back tests at a consistent density altitude and documented the results. There were about 20 items that I did, none of them at all big, but lots of small things added up. I think the RG is a great candidate for a program like that because there are so many opportunities in terms of things that you can improve.

 

Hey Rob

I owned a 201 for 10 years and then in 2000 bought an Ovation . I have 1,600?+ hours in Mooney's

The maintenance on Mooney's is fantastic. I have nothing but great things to say about either models The Ovation is better than the 201 in every way but you have to decide whether or not it makes financial sense to spend the extra dough.


I have plenty of Bo time as well and can say that I wouldn't trade my Ovation for a Bonanza.

Any questions I would be happy to help

Vernon
N111VS M20R

 

I usually see about 16.5 gph at 8,000 ft and 180 knots. I never slow down to 160-170 but my guess is I could do that with about 12-13 gph.
I have carried 4 people in both hundrends of times both planes can easily handle the mission.

The 201 is a perfect airplane and will do anything you need it to do for extremely cheap. They are unbeatable!

The Ovation is a stretched 201 just more refined and smoother (6 banger).

 

Suggest a later rather than an early 201 if that's the option and pass entirely on an Executive. Not sure what sort of labour they had working over there during the 70s GA boom, but having had a 77 then subsequently an early 80s model, then flown the 252 and the Porsche, quality seemed to improve by leaps and bounds the later they are.

Wet wing leaks as mentioned, shade pretty much any diabolical accessibility issues Ferrari have devised too....pulling the interior plastics and carpet in the wing root area for the telltale staining (if an avgas aroma is not a hint) would be a worthwhile inspection.

Sure it's an exaggeration for the purpose of the story, but if that A&P mentioned previously, is taking half an hour to pull the cowling...wow, wouldn't want to see what he'd expect for major work!

 

I have an M20TN and it is a great plane. I get decent economy and great cruise. I went down to the Mooney from a Baron and cut my operating cost in half while flying faster with air conditioning. Except for the fact that general aviation is in an economic tailspin (and Mooney is currently out of production mode) I think a Mooney is the best piston single out there.

 

I don't know anything about Mooney's, but I wonder if you could put a Garmin 600 into that airplane? Either that or an Aspen would give you glass.

An airplane I've been flying (Commander 690A) just had the Garmin 600 retrofitted, but I haven't had a chance to fly it since the work was done. Looks nice, though.

 

Get the turbo RG if possible.

 

Very nice - maybe not quite as pretty as a Mooney, but very practical.

BTW, have you flown a Mooney lately? I somehow remember them as having a very odd feeling to the controls, particularly the elevators.

 

I love my Mooney, it does everything right and goes like hell. Here is a shot on the ice a couple of weeks ago. Buy one.
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