Still Flying in 2010

It's been a busy few days but everyone had a good Christmas and New Years. I decided to get in a little more Mooney Bravo practice before having to go back to work tomorrow. Here I am at about 4,000 feet over Dalton:

I'm still not sure if I like this plane or not. I definitely like the idea of going 200 knots, especially if I'm going to take longer and longer trips, and I like the turning visibility you get with a low wing. That is, when you're banking left or right and you look in the direction of the bank, you can actually see what you're turning towards. With high-wing planes like the Skyhawk and Skylane, all you see in a bank is the bottom of the wing.

On the other hand, the high-wing is nice when you're trying to look at the ground. In the Mooney at least the pilot sits slight forward of the wing, so you can look left and down and see what's under you, but visibility below is clearly better in the Cessnas. What they really need to invent is a plane with the wing at eye level and with windows above and below it. Yeah, that's it!

Anyway, Tom had mentioned in his comment to my last post about some volcanic activity in Puerto Rico that was causing visibility issues for air traffic. That comment was a few days ago, but I decided to check it out anyway, loading up a quick flight from San Juan Int'l in my trusty Skylane with real world weather turned on:
Nothing to report on takeoff. A little cloudy but other wise skies look blue. After gaining some altitude though the air below me got decidedly hazy:
I doubt FSX has a volcano simulator built into it but this may be it's effort to simulate the visibility data it's getting from its weather service. Hard to tell.

Anyway, back to comparing the Mooney to the Cessna. The main problem is that the Mooney is significantly harder to fly and harder to land. I've not crashed yet, but I've not had a really good landing either. Every one of my 5 landings in the Mooney have been nail-biters. I may rethink the switch and keep flying the Skylane a bit longer until I get more experienced.