What was your max groundspeed?

[Lood]

What is the highest ground speed that you've managed in your Mooney
Mine was:
1967 M20F - 186kt straight & level with 201kt on the descend.

[Chimsoro]

Lood for a 'f' that is fast. Must have had a gale-force tail wind ?
Great too see a bit of activity on the 'Mooney ' forum.
CBW new owner will contribute a lot and enjoy his learning curve reports!!!

[Lood]

Lood for a 'f' that is fast. Must have had a gale-force tail wind ?
Great too see a bit of activity on the 'Mooney ' forum.
CBW new owner will contribute a lot and enjoy his learning curve reports!!!

IIRC, the forecast for that specific day was 60 - 70kts It was really pumping. My F normally cruise at around 140 TAS, so I had about 46kts on the tail. I might still have pictures somewhere.

[pieter001]

Heehaaa, great to see a bit of life on our Mooney thread

Especially on a topic a Mooney excels at, speed!

Sadly, on this topic is lack experience... but rest assured, when I get to cruise a bit more and get out of the circuit, I'd love to post some figures here. All I can post here at the moment is that I flew with Paul in CBX, a M20E, and we got 171knts on the descent from '9000 to '7000, which I thought was REALLY fast, until I read Lood's mail, WOW - 201 and 186 on S&L! That is flying!

In CBW (M20E) I flew with Barry, the previous owner one day and we did about 160 S&L, but we had a strong tailwind, which cost us at least 12knots on the flight out, but made up on the way back.

So, I'm growing desperate to get out of the circuit...

[flashfly]

My M20J - 193 knots S&L. I was tempted to dive it, but that wouldn't qualify for the 200knot club.
I was flying parallel to the swartberg mountains enroute to Wonderboom.

[Lood]

It would be great to do 200kt plus S&L, but I doubt whether my F will ever reach that. On this particular flight, I was on my way home from the Kalahari and had just passed VanderKloof Dam. The descend was from FL075 and I didn't have the option to stay up there. At 200kt, you can clearly see that you are really moving along and any descend has to start pretty far out in order to get at circuit altitude in time.
In the future, I would like to do a long distance flight as well as an endurance flight. Should be fun to see how far my Mooney can actually go at some conservative power setting as well as how long it can stay in the air. Don't know how well I'll handle the 8 or so hours in the saddle though. However, South Africa might become a bit small.

[pieter001]

On birn rate...
I did a 3hr xcntry flight and burned 75litres. That is 75lhr! Could hardly believe it. TAS 110kts @ MAP 17-18" and rpm around 2450. So my M20E with 190lt usable could stay airborne for 7+ hrs at 110kts tas. That is not a bad endurance

[pieter001]

Eish... This cellphone keyboard... 25lhr fuel burn is what I meant to type...

[TonyL]

I got 176kts ground speed yesterday returning to Wings Park from PE yesterday. At a TAS of around 143kts that meant a tailwind of around 33kts and that was only at FL035.

[marcgerm]

M20K 231 @ FL190 207knts S&L @ 12.8gal/hr with a tail wind component of aprox 10Knts

[andrem]

Wow Marc - the K flies fast!

On a flight to Upington last week we averaged 170 knots GS for 3 hours - flying RoP. On the way back I changed mixture a few times but still managed over 150 knots GS for the trip.
I've flown her into the yellow arc on the descent to FYWB on a perfect day (ground speed would have been over 200 knots), but I'm not too keen on that sort of flying - all this talk of wing flutter motivates me to stay within the green and white arcs only.

[Neville Ferreira]

2350 rpm
21" mp
50L/h

When ever I return from Klersdorp I always try to take a screen shot at the same area. Fastest Gs with the same power settings was 204Kts.

[andrem]

Hi Neville, do you also fly a K?

[Lood]

I set a new straight & level ground speed on Wednesday. Ran back home from the Kalahari to beat the approaching cold front. Unfortunately, things got so bad on the descend that I was forced come way back on the power and keep with a max ROD of 300 - 400ft/min, that I could only match my previous descend max GS of 201kts.

[andrem]

Lekker Lood!