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Mooney Reveals New Ownership

The company has operated for the last six months to keep parts flowing.

The rumblings have been going on for some time as to what the next chapter would be for the Mooney aircraft company, with a minimal amount of activity continuing to quietly sustain the business over the last 9 months. Now, what has been rumor turns to fact: Mooney’s new owners revealed themselves in an open letter from the new CEO, Jonny Pollack, posted on the company’s home page on September 1.

Pollack casts himself as part of the Mooney community, and rightfully so, as he’s owned more than one over his 20-plus-year aviation career—a 201 for 15 years, and now an Acclaim. His letter indicates that the OEM will be led by a team made up entirely of pilots and Mooney owners giving the company a unique and valuable perspective going forward.

Flying reached out to Pollack for more details, and one message is clear: the new ownership group has a true love for Mooney. “Everyone understands how important the brand is,” he says. “We have to keep Mooney alive no matter what that looks like.” Pollack, an entertainment attorney based in New York, is backed by a Wyoming-based ownership group, US Financial, LLC, which shares his passion for the design and its legacy.

Right now, that’s continuing to serve the Mooney community with its most pressing needs. “Mooney has to become a parts company first,” says Pollack. The company has been operating using a limited number of employees to keep critical components of the business alive since January. “Our first and immediate focus is to make sure that we’re properly servicing the community’s fleet of over 7,000 aircraft. For the last six months, we’ve taken over parts production and managed to keep the spares moving to the service centers. We have plans to improve our efficiency so that parts are easier to order and arrive sooner.” Pollack also feels responsibility to Kerrville, Texas, the town that has supported Mooney for decades, and “yo-yoed” back and forth with each bankruptcy and change of hands.

Plans are also afoot to address wish-list items that Mooney owners have had for some time. A useful load increase retrofit is in the works, “but that will take some time,” said Pollack. More immediately, the company announced that it recently secured FAA approval over and will be offering an upgrade to the legacy Garmin G1000 software. It will allow ADS-B to play with the G1000 so pilots can access traffic, free weather, and all available approaches on the Mooney’s display. The company also plans to offer a carbon-fiber cowl for the Ovation models, to immediately improve useful load—and a long-awaited upgrade to the Garmin G1000 NXi I to NXi II plus a future path for legacy G1000 owners to upgrade to the NXi I and II.

The renaissance of Mooney will be more complex than simply launching a portfolio of new ideas—as Pollack puts it, “we have to patch up the ship first.” The factory itself is a bit of “an albatross,” a shop run by dedicated craftspeople, but an anachronism in a world of 3D printing and extended supply chains. “It’s going to take time,” says Pollack. “I really have a love for Mooney.”

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