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From the Airways to the Fairways
by Jeff Berlin
I’m on the white tee of the famous 15th hole of the Tournament Players Club Stadium Course in Scottsdale, Arizona, looking down the long verdant fairway, straightening my green plaid knickers and Polo a la Payne Stewart, and I swear that towering, prickly Saguaro cactus is flipping me the bird as I try to keep my rusty game together. 
I grew up playing golf, and even after time off, my stroke usually comes back pretty quickly, within a few swings at the practice range. Still, now that I’m well into what’s becoming a painful—though painfully fun—round on one of the Southwest’s more challenging and picturesque courses, I’m just hoping on this long par five to simply drive my tee shot true and long enough to where I can crack a three iron and lay up nice for an easy chip and short putt—par! Should be a snap. Too bad I find, as I get older, in golf and tennis, my mind is often making shots my body won’t. And after shanking my tee shot, I was ready to nibble on my niblick as I dropped another ball for my much-needed Mulligan. At least my flight in a couple hours ago went smoothly.
There’s nothing quite like hopping almost directly from the plane to the course and chipping an approach to a green barely an hour after on approach to an airport. And if you’re lucky enough to be flying that approach in a brand-new Mooney Acclaim Type S, like my friend Mike Allen and I did, that’s about as good as it gets. It’s experiences like these that highlight the stark differences between personal aviation and commercial air travel.
When I was a kid, my first flight in a small airplane was in a Mooney Ranger. We launched that day from a now-defunct airport nicknamed “Speeds” that lay across the bay from New York’s La Guardia airport, in the shadow of the Empire State Building. I was, maybe, 12 years old and I’ll never forget that flight. Tooling around in the little Mooney that blustery afternoon changed everything. 
Since then, I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Mooneys. But of all the cool and unusual planes I’ve flown for all the stories I’ve written and all the places I’ve traveled, I never again flew a Mooney since that day. I was long overdue to revisit the airplane that, for me, was the beginning of the end. So when Mooney agreed to throw me the proverbial keys to a new Acclaim Type S, I couldn’t think of a better mission to wring it out than to scoot on over to TPC Scottsdale for a round of golf and an overnight at the Fairmont Scottsdale resort.
Why TPC? Because their golf courses, and the Fairmont right next to it, are top notch and located an easy nine iron from Scottsdale airport. The Acclaim Type S is Mooney’s latest evolution of the M20 airframe, and is the fastest Mooney yet from a company whose name is synonymous with fast airplanes. When I walked around the airplane, pre-flighting for my golf run, I couldn’t help but think that the Acclaim looks purpose-built to attain the 242 knots that pilots are seeing up in the flight levels. So often, we hear pilots equate Mooneys to sports cars, and after my flights to Scottsdale and back, I know why. The Mooney was definitely more compact than the Cirrus I usually fly, but not as narrow as the Bonanza (though it does have less headroom than the Beech). As such, pilot seating position in the Acclaim is definitely more sports car than luxury cruiser, but Mike and I both had ample room and were comfortable throughout both flights. As is typical on early June mornings in Los Angeles, there were a couple-thousand-foot-thick overcast blanketing much of the L.A. basin, so my first departure in a Mooney after a lot of years would be an instrument one to VFR On Top.
The G1000 flat panel system is now standard on all Acclaims, so even though I was stepping into an airframe that was completely new to me, I was confident that transition would be pretty easy. After all, I’ve spent the past few years tooling around in turbocharged, turbonormalized, and sometimes turboprop airplanes. 
With glass up front and a top end of 242 knots, the Acclaim Type S is definitely speeding along in turboprop territory. No big deal, I thought. I was right ... and I was wrong. Even with the workload-saving G1000, I found the pilot workload in the Mooney to be a bit higher than both of its direct competitors, the Cessna 400 Corvallis TT and the Cirrus Turbo. Of course, I’m not implying that the pilot workload in the Mooney is anywhere near unmanageable or even difficult, it just has different procedures from other turbocharged piston singles that I’ll detail shortly which are specific to the Acclaim.
As I settled into the left seat for my couple-hours flight to the links, I found the Mooney interior handsome, well-finished, and comfortable. Adding to that comfort were the low noise and vibration levels. Even without my Bose X headset, I was easily able to converse with Jenny and Mike. Mike is a bit bigger than the average FAA bear and he was always a happy camper in the Mooney. Indeed, it’s an ideal place to spend a few hours covering a lot of ground. 
The G1000 installation is clean, well laid out, and well integrated into the panel. The leather-wrapped yoke feels nice and falls nicely into hand, and most everything seems to be where it should be, except for the Acclaim’s electro-mechanical backup gauges, which are at the far right edge of the instrument panel and never really made it into my scan. I would love to see them a bit more front and center.
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