Most people believe that everything that can  be invented has already been invented, and  

manufacturers are merely designing products that  will sell well according to the market conditions.  

And that's not a lie; the aviation industry  is a huge, complex, and expensive industry.  

The cost of error is high, and no one is in  a hurry to take risks. The hesitation to take  

risks can sometimes be devastatingly expensive,  and our today's legend is a victim of hesitation.  

To better understand why Mooney aircraft failed,  let's understand the last models of the M20;  

the M20U Ovation Ultra, and the M20V Acclaim  Ultra, but for the sake of simplicity,  

we’ll talk more about the Acclaim. When the  Mooney M20V Acclaim Ultra came to the market,  

it delivered something pilots had long wished  for; a second door, Mooney did not just add  

another door, they made both doors  wider, making entries and exits easier.

The panel and cabin have been updated. The  four-seat interior's updated ergonomic design,  

which has hand stitched Italian leather seats,  abundant cup holders, and power outlets,  

is inspired by luxury automobiles. There  are two color combinations available for  

the accentuated leather seats: black + saddle  brown and black + light grey. The switchology  

on the new panel for the Acclaim Ultra has been  restructured, and rockers have replaced toggles.  

The panel is well-organized, but some switches  are hidden by the yoke due to its small size. The  

airplane has the most modern, user-friendly Garmin  G1000 NXi avionics as well as Synthetic Vision.  

This system has faster processing for a quicker  startup and almost instant graphics refreshing.  

Garmin appears to have simplified the operational  logic, and the displays are brighter and clearer.  

The Garmin keypad, which is now placed at the  bottom of the panel, can be used to control  

the G1000 avionics. The option to write in fixes  and frequencies rather than turning the G1000's  

knobs is a huge improvement, even though it is not  quite in the ideal place for the armrest position.  

The GFC700 autopilot and the G1000 NXi are  fully connected, and a vertical control panel  

is positioned in the middle of the two display  displays. The GFC700 currently has a reputation  

as the best new autopilot in General Aviation  and it’s deserved. It allows for flexible  

aircraft control and the ride is silky smooth. The  Acclaim Ultra is well equipped that there aren't  

many extra options to choose from. For $16,720,  you can add the GTS 800 active traffic system,  

but most pilots don’t go for it because  ADSB traffic is as good as it gets.  

Because of the weight limit, you can get either  ice protection or air conditioning, not both.  

The air conditioning is a $29,000 option with a  weight penalty of 66 pounds, or 30 kilograms. TKS  

weighs 95 pounds, or 43 kilograms fully charged,  and it adds $65,000 to the invoice. Most pilots  

always ditch the air conditioning, because  they can simply pop the door open during taxi.

Speaking of the new second door, adding  a second door to a 50-year-old design  

is no easy feat, Mooney made them bigger and  better. The doors have new latching mechanisms  

and tasty brushed aluminum handles. This means  that access to the rear seats is much easier.  

In addition to that, having a door on the  left side of the fuselage allows the pilot  

to step right into the left seat without  having to squeeze through the entire cabin.  

Visibility over the glare shield is  noticeably better than in the earlier Ovations  

and the Bravo because Mooney has lowered the  height of the panel by more than two inches,  

something that's especially welcome when taxiing  at night. The higher glare shields were an  

undesirable carryover from the Porsche Mooney days  that has finally been corrected. On top of that,  

they also added a new composite skin to enclose  the cabin’s protective Chromoly-steel roll cage.  

Traditionally all-metal, the airplane now has a  composite canopy that enhances the aerodynamic  

flow and reduces cabin noise. Also, the windshield  and windows are slotted into the composite from  

the outside, a process that is much faster and  will make replacements a breeze compared with  

the previous design. The tail cone and wings  remained metal, and the cowling was already  

made of composites. The airplane sports dozens  of less obvious improvements, including a carbon  

fiber cowl, gear doors and wingtips, and drag  performance including a gap seal for the flaps.

Speaking of performance, the aircraft is powered  by a 280-horsepower Continental TSIO-550-G,  

with three bladed Hartzell propellers in front.  It achieves a maximum climb rate of 1,375 feet,  

a ceiling of 25,000 feet, or 7,620 meters, and a  maximum speed of 242 knots. At an economy cruise  

speed of 175 knots, the maximum range is 1,275  nautical miles, with a fuel burn of roughly  

20 gallons per hour. Mooney’s turbocharged  models have never been payload workhorses,  

and neither is the Acclaim Ultra. Despite the  serious innovations the Acclaim and the Acclaim  

Ultra got, they couldn’t save Mooney from the  economic nose dive course. There are reasons  

why Mooney’s sold slowly this time around, and it  wasn’t the machines. The company greatly improved  

the product; they added space, a pilot-side door,  made the windows bigger and the avionics sweeter,  

all by incorporating a composite forward fuselage  shell. The transformation was impressive.  

Unfortunately, it failed to impress potential  customers enough to keep the program alive.  

The new Ultras, the brand name for the new,  improved M20s, sold slowly, which is sad  

because they did everything aeronautical at  a great rate of speed. The Acclaim Ultra is  

the fastest production piston single ever, and  by a good margin, too. Why some people turn up  

their noses at Al Mooney’s old-school design  is a mystery to me. 240 knots is wicked fast,  

and even if corrected for actual flying conditions  because, let’s face it, who flies a single at  

25,000 feet, you’re still looking at a 220-knot  airplane in the mid-teens at less than 20gph.

The M20’s main competition, if you  can even call the Mooney competition,  

is the Cirrus SR22 and the Cessna TTX, which are  slower, more expensive, and, for some people;  

less sexy than Mooney’s slick  little retractable gear speedster.  

But the Cirrus SR22 outsold Mooneys by a factor  of around 50:1. Why? In part, it’s because Cirrus  

has a stable business profile, its marketing is  super slick, its technology is top notch, and  

it has the parachute, which a lot of pilots, and  not just their spouses, are asking for these days.  

Did the M20, which is time-consuming to build,  ever really have a chance against the SR22?  

Of course, it didn’t. Nothing exists in a  vacuum, which is to say that Mooney’s success,  

at least some of it, will come from siphoning  sales from Cirrus and perhaps Cessna’s TTx.  

How would the three look to a  potential buyer comparing them?  

First, payload. For the sake of not  kinda comparing apples to oranges,  

let's use the Ovation Ultra for this comparison  instead of the Acclaim because of the payload  

difference. The Ovation Ultra had a useful load  of 1050 pounds on a gross weight of 3368 pounds.  

Standard fuel is 100 gallons, so with full tanks,  that leaves 450 pounds for people and stuff.  

The Ultra, then, is a two-person airplane with  generous baggage or a three-person ride if down  

fueled by about 20 gallons. The SR22—the direct  competitor—has a useful load of about 1200 pounds  

on a gross of 3600 pounds, so it’s not  really a seats full, tanks full airplane,  

but can get there with little down fueling. This,  in part, may account for why Cirrus dominates  

the single-engine high-performance market and  why sales of the SR22 and turbocharged SR22T  

are almost evenly split. Even though surveys  consistently find that most piston GA trips  

carry just one or two people, buyers apparently  want the option of backseats they can really use.  

Except some would rather go farther and  faster with the rear seats full of stuff or  

nothing at all. These are the probable  Mooney buyers. Head-to-head against the SR22,  

the Mooney flies farther, is faster, and burns  less gas than the Cirrus. For all-out range  

on full tanks, with a 45-minute reserve, the  Ovation Ultra can manage 1154 still-air miles  

against the Cirrus’ 872 miles—a range delta  of 32 percent. It will get there faster, too.  

Non-turbocharged aircraft typically reach their  cruise stride at 8000 to 10,000 feet. Climbing  

above that without a turbocharger dings cruise  speed because of diminishing engine power. Still,  

the Ultra is a solid 190-knot airplane at these  altitudes using best-power throttle settings. Dial  

it back to best economy and the speed is still  180 knots. The SR22 is eight to 10 knots slower. 

It’s also a little thirstier. At 8000 feet and 75  percent power, the SR22 will cruise at 180 knots  

and 17.8 gallons. The Mooney will do 190 knots  at 15.9 GPH. Thus is the payoff of a lighter,  

smaller airframe with landing gear that folds  up. But was the niche attractive enough to let  

the program survive the long term? Hard to say.  Would sales of 50 planes a year have been enough?  

Maybe not. It’s expensive to build airplanes, and  much of that expense is beyond Mooney's control.  

Mooney buys a lot of components from vendors,  and there are hundreds of items on every Mooney,  

everything from engines and props to nuts and  bolts, is sold by those vendors so they can  

make a profit. They are not giving engines away.  And the things the airframer needs to build take  

hundreds of employees and extremely expensive  infrastructure and tooling. Building airplanes  

is not for the faint of heart, or checkbook. So,  could Mooney have succeeded? Maybe, but it would  

have had to have exceeded expectations, by a lot.  The part of the problem that is never talked about  

is that Mooney was and is still owned by  a Chinese company. Part of the promise of  

Chinese ownership was that a burgeoning Chinese  aviation sector would drive sales of hundreds  

upon hundreds of new Mooneys. The company even  designed a cute little two-seater, the model M10,  

which kind of resembled the old Mooney M10 Cadet,  which was an outgrowth of the Ercoupe design. It  

never got built or flown, and the thousands of  sales of that emerging model never materialized. 

The sprawling Mooney International  Corp. factory in Kerrville, Texas,  

where more than 11,000 single-engine  airplanes have been produced since 1953,  

has slipped back into hibernation. When, or  if, it will ever reemerge, no one really knows.  

A previous skeleton crew kept the company  alive, on paper at least, from 2008 until 2013.  

The latest Mooney closure isn’t surprising given  the company’s weak sales record. The company  

delivered just 14 airplanes in 2018, according to  the General Aviation Manufacturers Association,  

well below the company’s stated annual target of  at least 25. The Chinese owners invested heavily  

in modernizing production with new equipment and  materials, and they made thoughtful improvements  

to its flagship M20 Ovation and Acclaim Ultra  models with a left-side door and composite cabin.  

And even though the M20s are faster and have  nearly identical engines and avionics to the  

market-leading Cirrus SR22s, Mooneys don’t have  airframe parachutes—and for that reason alone,  

Cirrus far outsold them. An airframe parachute  would have boosted new aircraft sales, but Mooney  

was not willing to pursue FAA certification for a  parachute. Instead, they focused on the emerging  

Asian market and planned to produce airplanes  in China. But that market never materialized.  

Mooney has a loyal following among owners  who prize speed, handling qualities, range,  

and value—and the existing fleet of used Mooney  aircraft was its most serious competition.  

For example, a brand-new Acclaim had a retail  price of $800,000, but 10-year-old models with  

nearly identical performance are available for  one-third or even one-fourth of that amount.  

Value-conscious Mooney pilots were reluctant  to pay such a high premium for new airplanes  

when the same amount gets a Cirrus, which  gets them a parachute peace of mind.  

Mooney has economically deteriorated so many  times only to be revived by optimistic new owners  

as to defy any realistic laws of business.  The plane is fundamentally a great design.  

It also has a good base to form a core  parts and support business. Mooney was  

offering refurb programs for old models,  and that might still be an expansion option.  

As for coming back? The Cirrus SR22 dominates  the market not only because it’s a good design,  

but because they have a skilled and aggressive  sales force and post-sale customer care that  

owners rave about. To remain a player,  Mooney may have to at least match that.