I was expecting someone to come up with that one.
So if it's such a good system why did Mooney abandon it?
Probably the same reason the more reliable and simple manual transmission is becoming nearly impossible to purchase in cars.
People are lazy and marketing works. Early automatics SUCKED. But hey, pushbutton convenience!
Plus you’re talking about a long gone era where everyone was still enamored with buying electric appliances for their kitchen. Dishwashers were a big hit.
Pushing a button to put the gear down was the equivalent of today’s dream of having a robot do all the housework.
Different times. The Mooney handle likely felt “dated” to the aircraft review pundits of the day.
And completion was fierce. Mooney’s competitor was advertising their fancy Land-o-Matic landing gear. Haha. If they could make gear that could make all landings easy, surely the Johnson Bar was outdated and in need of “upgrade” right?
(And your computer needs a faster processor and more RAM every year to go to the same websites you went to last year. And your pocket computer plus phone doesn’t take phone calls much anymore but needs a 6.5” screen and 128 GB of storage, bigger than my first hard drive by sixfold that was the size of four of those “book” things that now I read on my tablet or eReader.)
All evidence so far indicates by far that the most common failure in the landing gear system is the loose nut between the headset cups anyway. The systems for putting the gear up and down are way more robust than the moron behind the yoke.
Hydraulics weren’t exactly new when they were put in airplanes either. It was mostly a cost issue and complexity issue. Every kid on every farm knew how to fix a blown hydraulic line long before they were installed on airplanes built out of 30s era tractor engines and 40s era car parts in Wichita. Generators didn’t like the surge needed to start a stalled hydraulic pump. Alternators with higher output and more consistent output at low RPM in prep for landings, were much happier with it.
The modern aircraft trend is back toward simplicity and not bothering to suck the gear up at all, if we disregard the 70s era classics we’re all mostly flying for economic reasons. The airframes are more aerodynamic and they fly with less power needed to go fast without bothering to suck the gear up at all.
The FAA is even rumbling about removing the retract requirement on some ratings as long as modern cockpit tech is taught in its place.
That’s how far down the path we are, in a modern sense, of dumping the gear handle altogether in light aircraft.
So, no real need to analyze why simple mechanisms like the Mooney early gear were replaced with the flick of a switch. Of course thy were. You had to suck the gear up back then to go fast. LoPresti and fiberglass and composites were still a pipe dream back then. And “pushbutton convenience” was a marketing “thing” back then. Levers and gears were “so 1940s”.
We just don’t see the real demand for retracts anymore. The SR22T and TTX and other modern airframe owners aren’t screaming at the manufacturers to suck the gear up. They’re faster than anybody else most of the time anyway. Certainly faster than us 70s spam can metal airplane drivers.
FAA requiring them for certain certificates has kept a lot of retracts that would otherwise have been put out to pasture long ago, alive and barely maintained so Commercial and CFI candidates can go bomb around the pattern putting them up and down and up and down and up and down as they practice their power off 180s.
The modern airplane owner’s insurance companies seem to like the trend away from retracts, too. And insurance really drives much of this industry. Insuring a retract in a club or school adds a dollar amount commensurate with the accident rate, which as mentioned above, is mostly not caused by hydraulic or other system failures. It’s caused by pilots not putting the gear down.
Although I will admit hearing about the CFI ride with a Fed here locally that ended in a nose gear collapse on the last landing was pretty darn entertaining. That one was mechanical and the candidate passed I heard. The airplane was plenty checked out for airworthiness prior to takeoff, I’m sure. Why mention it?
Because most of us couldn’t spot a real gear problem in a preflight anyway, if we saw it. I’ll honestly say I could have looked under that airplane’s nose and probably not seen anything the candidate and a Fed didn’t see that would cause the nosegear to fold after touchdown at a normal landing rate of descent.
The retract fleet is getting really really old. Stuff is going to break. And does. It takes a good mechanic to know when to replace parts that are worn out and how often they fail.
Certain problematic systems have promoted more dramatic common changes like many owners of much older 210s taking the gear doors off. Gear works fine. Doors can become a problem. So they just yank them off and lose a couple of knots and call it a day. Cessna even did away with them on the newer ones eventually, so anecdotally even they gave up on them.
I’ve never read of anyone needing to modify the Mooney lever system. It “just worked”. It even had some built in abuse protection. Try to push that handle forward above the gear extension speed or even just flying fast, your arm muscles reminded you that you were doing something possibly dumb. Hydraulics will just push the metal out into the slipstream and let the wind load bend it or stress the connection points.
Let’s go one step further. Not trying to be anti-PC here but smaller people and ladies have taken up flying since the days of Mooney’s heyday. Muscle power available doesn’t always match the average available back then. I flew a checkride in an airplane with busted electric trim. It was a heavy plane, and the tiny manual trim wheel was a pain in my butt.
That same airplane the owner got the electric trim fixed when a customer showed up who simply didn’t have the arm strength to mess with that wheel for hours and hours of training flights back to back. She’s a good pilot. She’d do absolutely fine manually managing it in a real electric trim failure. But asking her to do it fifty or sixty times like I did in the same airplane for my rating? Just rude. So they fixed it.
Now I’m kinda jealous. They even fixed the autopilot while they were at it.
That would have made my checkride a bit easier. Or maybe I’m not jealous and appreciated the extra work. I don’t really know.
I survived it fine, either way.
Electric powered retractable landing gear is a feature that came, and now mostly has gone. It won’t be a very long time until the first time anyone sees it is in multi training. And that’s going to get expensive because Primacy and repetition of not having it will be a *****.
To try to alleviate that, many are teaching to always check the gear is down even in non-retracts from Day One. Not a completely awful idea.
