Y'all, sorry for not being able to be more responsive on all these problems. The `_data` is indeed the private property accessing the underlying `ndarray` (just like `_mask` stores the boolean `ndarray` corresponding to, you guessed it). Neither `_data` or `_mask` are supposed to be accessible to the lay person, hence the `data` and `mask` properties. Well, hence the `mask`: the `data` was introduced to give a quick access to the `ndarray` in cases where you'd want to drop the `MaskedArray` part for a while, perform faster computations and pull the mask back at the end. 
In the problem at hand, the objective is to get the underlying data in its 'least-adulterated' form: @charris is right, it should be `dout=self.view(...)[indx].