On Jul 31, 10:46*pm, Mike Ash wrote:
In article
,

*a wrote:
For what it's worth, I learned something back when cars had manual
transmissions. I was taught to never hold the shifter, but to move it
or 'slap' it in the right direction with an an open hand. *On my
Mooney, the gear switch looks like a wheel, it would be easy to grasp
it -- I never do. Down means pushing it down with my finger tips, , up
means lifting it up with them.

So far it's worked, but there's always tomorrow!

Sensible when you can do it, but not workable for manual gear levers.
The gear lever in my plane is a direct linkage requiring a significant
amount of force, and so I have no choice but to grab it strongly. Worse,
the lever's travel is fore-and-aft, making it extremely non-obvious
which end corresponds to up and which to down!

--
Mike Ash
Radio Free Earth
Broadcasting from our climate-controlled studios deep inside the Moon

I've never experienced it, but there must be a huge amount of ground
effect float in something like a Mooney as it sinks that close to the
ground with the gear up -- it would go well with that sinking feeling
of OMG, wouldn't it?

The only manual gear retraction airplane I flew was a Mooney Ranger
(M20C), and that thing we called a Joe bar made gear position pretty
obvious.