62 SEPTEMBER 2019 ÇPlane&Pilot
I
n a 35-mm transparency I only recently discovered
in my library, there’s an image of a red-and-white
Mooney M20C in front of a hangar with an older
couple standing in front of it. The best guess I’ve got is
that it’s the couple who sold N5746Q to my late friend
and mentor, Chris Smisson, a year before I was born.
In the web of folklore told to me in the years I’ve
been flying, the stories are snipped, short and incom-
plete, but the basic gist is this: Chris put much of
himself into this plane over the years, spending many
late nights at the Navy Flying Club’s hangar, wires
spread everywhere and interior stripped, making
46Q into a great little traveling machine. Over time,
he changed the windshield and wingtips to those
more like a Mooney 201, installed fairings and gap
seals, and modified the cowling from the “Big Gulp”
intake, which was horribly inefficient,
to a smaller inlet that properly directs
the airflow. He had a local guy make
an interior out of surplus carpet from
Delta Airlines, bought for pennies on
the dollar at their scrap sales.
And then there’s the panel. Folks
would have a hard time not describing
my friend Chris without some mention
of hyperactivity. “Like someone teed
up a ping-pong ball in a porcelain-
tiled bathroom,” was my very favor-
ite descriptor. The panel matched its owner well.
Retaining Mooney’s approach to instrument layout
one might liken to a dartboard after the players had
one too many, he filled the spaces with the very best
the early 1990s had to offer. A II Morrow LORAN unit
gave him “Direct-To” abilities. A BF Goodrich WX-900
Stormscope pointed out where the bad stuff was before
we had datalink weather readily available. A pair of
King KX-155 radios could guide him down through
the soup. It was the perfect machine for a man who
couldn’t stay in one place very long.
And then there was the paint scheme. A two-tone
gray stripe followed the familiar pattern born on many
Mooneys, but a few thin lines of gray on the tail andwingtip gave hint that something was different. A
Mooney sits only slightly higher than a kid’s go-kart,
so the surprise is as rare as it’s fleeting: Its belly is
patterned with a design evocative of a bird in flight,
not all that much unlike the USAF Thunderbirds’
design. The story goes that our friend John David
Mullins, the flight surgeon for the Georgia Air Guard
and a close friend to all in this story, drew it up on a
cocktail napkin.
When Chris met Heidi, he took her on a date that
only he could have managed. Heidi, a flight attendant,
finished a trip, and he had arranged (pre-2001, obvi-
ously) to taxi up to the same gate where she sat, and
tucked under the wing of the Boeing sat the Mooney
they used for a rustic getaway to visit a few friends
while camping. There are few people who could pull
off a Sun ’n Fun camping trip just that way, but he
did, and it worked. Their marriage lasted until his
last heartbeat.
The Mooney served as the machine that enabled
many getaways, and when Skylar made his arrival,
the backseat got more and more use. Kelly Leggette,
a friend who owned a share of his Zlin-526, bought
a sliver of ownership after his use of the Mooney
exceeded what the insurance company reasonably
considered “borrowing.”
When we lost Chris, Kelly bought the
remaining share of the Mooney, keep-
ing it in our flying family. He checked
me out in the plane, made sure I was
insured, and then cut me loose to build
all the complex time I needed.
I was helping him work on it one
night when I mentioned meeting an
airline recruiter who threatened me
bodily harm if I didn’t go fly for them. I
was wedged under that panel as Kelly
dropped two sheets of paper on me, a
blank check and an IOU, that opened the gateway for
a fantastic career and a life I couldn’t have imagined.
As a regional first officer, I still borrowed the keys
to the Mooney from time to time. I ran my buddy Tim
on a few excursions to visit his 172 while it was in the
paint shop, and I took it to Sun ’n Fun one year with
my friend Candice, who was trying to build time.
The registration number is very much in line with
the airline flight numbers I operated for a decade, a
fact that was lost neither on me nor on the controllers
around Atlanta as I often blurred work and pleasure on
radio calls. When I would call tower as “Acey 5746Q,”
they’d often as not chuckle and make some remark
about how it must be my day off.Tales A Mooney
Might Tell
How my “new” plane wriggled its
way into my life over the years.WORDS ALOFT
By Jeremy King❯ ❯ “A Mooney is a hard
airplane to love if you
don’t own it. They’re
cramped, both in the
cabin and in any space
you might be trying to
inspect or repair.”