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Flying
I am a VFR private pilot but I am not current. I let my currency lapse when I was working in California and I did not enjoy flying in the smog and haze. I now live in New Mexico. We often have visibility over 80 miles here. Moving and so forth have not been very supportive of getting back into flying.
I really started thinking about flying again when I was on a visit to Georgia visiting relatives. I took an afternoon and went down to Moultrie and Ray Maule took me for a spin or two in one of his Maule MX7 planes. There is a Maule dealer within about an hour flight time in Durango CO. So, I am keeping my eye out for an MX7 with a Lycoming IO540 engine. I will also need to get current and take some lessons on the peculiarities of taildraggers. I expect that the proper order of battle is to get current, rent a plane or join a club, get IFR, purchase an MX7, get special training for that plane.
I particularly like the Maule because of its performance. It is a very good mountain plane and good for dirt strip landing. Flying is a good way to get around in the west where the distances are so large. It takes about seven hours to drive to Denver from here and Phoenix is about six hours. The Maule is not the fastest plane, but it would cut those trips to under three hours. But you need a very powerful capable plane to fly through mountains and to be able to lift off from high altitude strips in the summer heat. I live at 5300 ft MSL.
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I have time in Cessna 150, 152, 172, 182; Piper Tomahawk, Warrior, and Archer; Bellanca Turbo Viking and Decathalon; and a demo ride in a Maule MX7. I did not log the time, but I also got to fly a Dehavilland Beaver float plane with an instructor in Alaska.
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I did not take off or land the Beaver. I did get to fly it through some fantastic country around Ketchikan. I had chartered it for flight-seeing and got into pilot talk with the operator. The company owner was an instructor and took me and my wife out for a ride and I flew it with him as PIC. He did the takeoff and landing. I had never been in a float plane before.
The area we flew in is called the Misty Fijords. You can fly next to vertical rock walls and through some beautiful areas. One of the coolest things was to fly just above the water and we went over a waterfall. One moment you are maybe fifty feet up and the next you are several hundred feet high looking straight down the falling water.
That kind of flying really reinforces my desire for a Maule MX7. It is kind of like a Super Cub on steriods and you can get it built with hardpoints for pontoons. Around here, we don't have enough water to make pontoons useful, but I would probably get the mounts on the framework.
General Note: Please resist the temptation to change the direction of this thread!
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I expect that the Maule with a 180 HP engine performs similarly to a Cessna 182 with STOL. I flew one down a runway at about 35 MPH. The difference between airborne and landing was just the setting on the CS prop.
The thing that I really like about the Maule, however is that it will easily handle the Lycoming IO540 engine which generates somewhere around 240 HP at sea level. Combine the taildragger configuration with a 3 blade CS prop and some decent tires and you have a pretty good rough field plane that is good for fairly short takeoffs and landings. If you have a spare $500K sitting around you can even get a turboprop engine.
Maule used to have an advertising picture of an MX5 that was airborne coming out of the hanger door. I thought that it was a nice advertising picture. It turns out that it is real. I have been to the hanger where the photo was taken in Georgia. They don't do that anymore because on one attempt they clipped the top of the rudder on the top of the door opening. No crash occurred, but it ruined the day for a bunch of people.
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I wasn't joking about the turboprop being available for the Maule, but I was kidding about anyone paying the price for one. I have never seen a Maule turboprop in service. For me the Lycoming engine will be just fine.
Aircraft performance is different where I live in the mountains. Some planes like a Cessna 152 can become land bound when the heated air density goes too low. Many of the 172s have been upgraded in the motors, but I am not sure what the modifications are.
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