At first glance the newly certified Mooney Ovation3 looks like just another Mooney (which, granted, is a little like saying “just another Porsche.”) But behind the familiar long-body lines are a couple of big changes.
Even before the Ovation3 came along, these airplanes were fast, and over the past few years they’ve gotten faster, and they’ve still got those great Mooney lines that have enchanted loyal owners for decades. Over that time, Mooneys havetypically come out of the factory equipped with great panels, and today’s Mooneys have the best panels yet, with the Garmin G1000 integrated avionics suite and now the Garmin GFC 700 digital autopilot. For added comfort and utility, you can get upgrades like air conditioning and known-ice-approved TKS. And I don’t care what you say, despite Cirrus and Columbia having really fast fixed-gear airplanes, there’s something that just feels right about retractable gear on a high-performance airplane. I’ve gotten used to it on the Cirrus, but the idea of a fixed-gear Mooney sounds blasphemous. (And you can save your emails: I know they built a couple fixed-gear models back in Eisenhower’s day.)
