Since 2002, I’ve been watching after a Mooney M20C Ranger. Whatever I’m doing is working, I figure, because I’ve been having a great time flying the airplane to fun destinations over the country. Which is great, but maybe I should start at the beginning.

I have it on good authority that when I was seven years old, I realized that there were big airplanes and little ones, and that normal people could fly the little ones. I resolved then that I would to learn to fly a little airplane. My mother mistook this for a “phase,” sort of like when I wanted to be an astronaut. So she told me that I could do anything I put my mind to while hoping I would forget the entire thing. I didn’t, but it was a formidable task to scrounge up the time and money to fly at that age, not to mention the ride to the airport. Weather consistently foiled my flying plans. In college, there wasn’t any money left for flying. 

Everything changed after moving to California. I had evenings and weekends free, income, and sunny weather in abundance. It wasn’t long before I had my certificate. I rented Cessnas for a while, until I had a bad experience. I thought about how nice it would be to own an airplane, which at the time seemed an absurd dream. My family and then-girlfriend disagreed, and they persuaded me to take the plunge. So in August 2000, I acquired a Piper Cherokee 140. The Cherokee was a great first airplane, easy to fly and cheap to fix; a gateway drug of sorts. I started meeting other airplane owners at the airport. That’s how I got started writing for Pilot Getaways magazine. That’s also when I met Cliff, owner of a very nice Mooney 201. It didn’t take more than a few flights in that airplane before I knew I would have one sooner or later. 

After a flight home from Seattle that seemed far longer than I thought it should have been, I started looking for a Mooney. There weren’t a huge number of Mooneys available in the “Cherokee 140 plus a pittance” price range. After a couple of months of looking, I located an airplane based near Los Angeles. The airplane had a lot going for it: the airframe had just 1,400 hours on it, it flew straight, it had no evident corrosion, everything except the wing leveler worked correctly, and the price was right. The downside was that it also had 1,400 hours on its original engine, having only been flown about ten hours a year for the previous 15 years. With this and a few minor squawks accounted for in the price, the deal was struck.

By then, my girlfriend was my fiancée, and she found the Mooney preferable by a wide margin. On one of our frequent trips to Los Angeles, one of our friends determined that the airplane is male. (I never checked, out of respect for its privacy.) From then on, we’ve taken to calling him Victor. The next year, after gaining some proficiency in the little Mooney and bringing the airplane’s mechanical reliability to an acceptable level, my fiancée and I took our first long trip. We flew from San Jose, CA to Manteo, NC for the First Flight Centennial celebration, and then spent some of the holidays with my family in New York and some with her family in Florida. The comparison to a similar trip we’d made in the Cherokee two years prior was no comparison at all. The Mooney went faster and higher, carried more, was more comfortable, and was better equipped. I knew after that trip the airplane was a keeper, so I started in on improving it further. This took the form of some interior projects, new paint, and an overhauled engine. 

These projects made a great airplane even better. We now have an airplane that is comfortable, reliable, and a joy to fly. We’ve been around the country twice, spent a week at Oshkosh, taken several trips to visit family and friends in the Northwest, and flown all over California. We even performed a flyby in the little Mooney for our wedding guests, a feat made easy given that the wedding was held at the Hiller Aviation Museum at San Carlos Airport. And it was that airplane that, at my wife’s insistence, carried us to Baja California for our honeymoon. My wife later had me looking for child-size headsets and fitting car seats in the Mooney for Elisa, our new family member born on 11/1/2008. Elisa has now flown with us on a few occasions, including on trips to Napa and Paso Robles. So now you all know why my airplane, and my wife, are the very best.