"Bob Gardner" wrote in message
news:b_EJb.49247$I07.150198@attbi_s53...
I have flown a Seminole over the Cascades with three adult passengers, and
it was a dog. Tops were at 12000 and I was in and out, unable to climb
much
higher. I am not proud of my decision to go that day.

Still, I fail to see what relevance to the accident in question that has.
All airplanes have a service ceiling, and the "trick" is to plan the flight
so as to not need to climb above that. Even IFR over the Cascades, there's
no need to go higher than 12000' absent bad weather conditions (icing,
convection, high winds, etc.). MEAs are significantly lower than that.

If there was something wrong with your decision to fly that day, it would
have had something to do with the weather, or the weights of your passenger
(if you flew overgross), or something along those lines. I don't see
anything inherently wrong with flying an airplane at or near maximum gross
weight, and certainly having all the seats full does not necessarily mean
the airplane was over the max gross weight, nor would it necessarily have
contributed anything to the accident in question.

If by "the Seminole is not a real four passenger airplane any more than a
Cessna 172 is", what you meant was "the Seminole can carry four passengers
just fine, depending on their weight", then I misunderstood, and you can
ignore all that I wrote.

Insofar as the HTML question is concerned, I'm not computer savvy enough
to
know what I am doing wrong. Why has this question just popped up, after
the
many, many times I have posted without changing any settings??

Not sure. I haven't been paying close attention, but perhaps your
newsreader is set to post in HTML, but does so only when you are posting a
message that is *not* a reply, using instead the previous post's formatting
(which is almost always plain text) when you are replying.

In other words, when you start a thread, it winds up HTML. When you reply
to a plain text message, it winds up plain text. Could that be the
difference?

Pete