On Mon, 11 Feb 2008 01:59:16 -0800 (PST), Tina
wrote:

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

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

Tina

My Mooney (N6213U) was a 1962 Mark 20C. Second year they went to all
metal. Hanger'd all it's life.

180 HP engine normalized with a Ray Jay Turbo.
Dual navcoms, ILS, market beacon, etc. (full IFR)
Built in Oxy.
Fuselage tank added. (about 6 1/2+ hours of fuel).
NO wing leveler. Hand fly all the time.
Manual gear, of course.

Looked a long time for a bird with these options.

On a normal take off, like you, I unloaded the bird and gear almost
came up by itself after unlocking the gear handle.

On a take off into minimums, my years of IFR flying experience in Air
Force showed that it was safer to get bird cleaned up before going IFR
so you could spend your effort flying bird and not have to worry about
configuring bird for flight.

Miss the little jewel but sold after came down with A-Fib (heart). Now
have two pacemakers (multi engine ) Just had a chest x-ray and I
have more wire in my chest than barb wire on a West Texas ranch )

Fly safe

Big John