You had a Ranger: we did too, before the 201. But I wanted a little
bit of air under the airplane because I used some forward pressure on
the yoke to lighten the load on the Joe bar during gear retraction.
Because of that we'd be pretty high -- a couple of hundred feet --
before bringing the gear up in hard IFR.

Did your Ranger pick up carb ice in the wink of an eye? Ours did, more
than any other normal carberated airplane I know of. There was never a
need to look for 3 green lights with the Ranger -- gear bar against
the instrument panel was on our pre landing checklist.


On Feb 11, 1:16 am, Big John wrote:
On Sat, 9 Feb 2008 15:58:05 -0800 (PST), Tina
wrote:

OK, our way is like this, It's a Mooney, and the gear comes up in
visual conditions at about 100 feet agl or when there's not enough
runway ahead to land. In hard IMC it's sometime after the transition
to instrument controlled flight if the ceiling is pretty low. We've
looked thru a bunch of complex SEL NTSB findings, haven't found
anything that suggests we're missing something that causes accidents
(other than staying on the ground and NOT driving to the airport)..

Is there a better way?

************************************************** ********************

My Mooney had a manual gear. When I took off with minimums I retracted
the gear (2 seconds to retract) as soon as I broke ground and still
had runway in sight.

This left me with nothing to do but fly the plane when I went hard
IFR.

Big John