Does this restriction mean that I could not fly the Mooney? Not at all. In fact, there was nothing to stop me from firing up 76Q after Ed left her with me and taking her up and away to all points anywhere. Of course, if the FAA caught me or if something happened then there would be, for lack of a better term, issues.
No, the big controller in the US is insurance. If I rammed my Mooney into someones house I most likely would have the bejeezus sued out of me--regardless of whether or not I survived the crash. If I did damage to the plane, I would have no fall-back to have it repaired. The insurance company looked at my experience level and required me to have ten hours of dual with an instructor before I could solo the plane. What this means is that I had to fly 76Q with a CFI qualified in complex aircraft for ten hours before I could fly her myself and have insurance coverage. Along the way, I needed to get a complex endorsement by an instructor. The endorsement is an entry in a pilot's logbook that says he is ok to do something. In this case it meant that the instructor was satisfied that I knew how to fly a complex airplane. There is no minimum requirement of time, either with ground school (classroom type training on the ground) or in flight time. The ten hours was more than adequate for me to get the endorsement.
I have joked about being "sentenced to ten hours", but the reality is that it was a necessary and sufficient time. My Mooney is without question a complex aircraft. The cockpit workload is an order of magnitude above that of a 152 or 172 Cessna. Mooney pilots like to call their airplanes "slippery" and I have added that term to my pilot jargon. The plane is slippery, there is just no better term to describe it. Combine the speed of the plane (yes, they are fast!), the slippery factor and the complex aspects and you are now piloting just a bit more than a trainer-type aircraft. I greatly envy the pilots that have been fortunate enough to have gotten their PPC (private pilot certificate) in a Mooney.
At one time the FAA classified 76Q as a high-performance aircraft. In those days, complex was combined with high performance. Now, the two are separated and in order to be high performance, the engine has to be greater than 200 hp. 76Q has a 200 hp Lycoming IO-360-A1A engine in her. This is a fuel-injected powerhouse that allows ground speeds of 193 mph. Well, the latter is what I have seen off the GPS. Typically, you want to be cruising at 163 mph versus 113 for your Cessna 172.
I did my familiarization training in San Antonio with Bob Cabe of Flight Training, Inc. After he signed me off I flew myself from KSAT (San Antonio International) to KBPT (Southwest Texas Regional). That first solo flight was like being on a drug and the landing at BPT was the best I had done in my plane. I had VFR flight following the whole way and then got cleared into KIAH (Houston International), one of the busiest airports in the US, Class B airspace. I heard big jets getting cleared to 35,000', or flight level 350. It was phenomenal.
