Kenny Keller reviews why helicopter students struggle most with weather: too many data sources and constantly changing variables. He shows how to use ForeFlight on an iPad to read METARs, TAFs, and radar, and announces a planned 600-page weather guide coming soon.
All right, today I want to talk about the helicopter training struggles that you guys and girls have been sending in. Weather has been coming up as the top one as of right now. Moving forward, I'm assuming that might change a little bit. But right now, weather, weather, weather keeps popping up. So I want to read to you what some of the members are saying. When I did my checkride, the emphasis on weather and all the pts required weather charts and what they mean and how long they are valid and what the purpose for all are under talked about. Totally understandable. I get that one. Weather is something all pilots have to have good grasp on for their entire training and career. A good start to grasping that at the private level could always be helpful. They sneak up on you. That's what I remember the most. And we'll cover one more Weather. There's no factor in aviation with so many changing variables as weather. We have charts and websites and metars, etc. But so much information at our fingertips that it might as well be written in Greek. Sometimes this is an area that gave me particular problems. So I totally get that. Weather is kind of a pain, but it's, you know, very important. It's all a part of the go, no go decision, making decisions whether you should even fly or not. And those decisions aren't always easy. So what we do have coming up for you is a 600 page presentation on weather that we're putting together. And it's needless to say, it's overwhelming and it's going to be overwhelming for me to get through all of it and get it all recorded, but that's the next project because that's what everybody's asking for. So we thought we'd get some weather out there for you. Meanwhile, I want to talk about some of the tools that we have now in our arsenal for checking weather and so on and the foreflights, what I've just been using recently, I'm sure there's others out there. I know some guys said, hey, try this one, try that one. Foreflights, just the one I know a lot of people were using and the one that I picked up and I've been kind of slow on the technology end of things. I've been old school and wanting to stick to the old ways of doing everything. And now that I got myself a mini iPad and I've started using it and started using the foreflight, I realized how cool this thing really is. So like right here in real time you can pull up an airport and real quick see, oh, there's a bunch of green. There's some yellow. Hmm. I was going to fly that way. I guess I better pay a little more attention here and see what's going on. So you can at the map have a real quick view of the weather. You can go to a specific airport and get your metars and taffs. Pull those right up. And this is cool because it gives you a simple breakdown. Visibility 10 miles view 1100 broken 1400 overcast 2700 temperature dew point so you can get the tafs, you can get the metars and it seems like a really pretty cool weather tool to just be able to use on the fly. So I'm just learning how to use this. But it's cool up here. Like in the left hand corner VFR lightning. Click on that and you have dew point spread temperature visibility surface 1 ceiling sky coverage pire ups lightning obstacles. Really, really cool stuff. And I'm glad that I've finally jumped on board and started, you know, kind of learning how to use the weather on the iPad. It's really cool. So while we're putting together this new weather presentation, meanwhile we do have about a 20 minute weather presentation that's in pre flight preparation tab under Weather information. So we do have that that you can look at right now. And then we've got another big weather presentation coming up. So keep the feedback coming in. You can comment right down below this video if you want to relay some of your flight training struggles. We're going to keep those comments coming in and we'll keep tallying them up so that we can be in order know what really are the biggest problems and then we'll work kind of down the list. So keep that feedback coming in and we'll see you in the next one which is helicopter instructors and trouble that members are reporting that they're having with their instructors. That's going to be number two. So leave us your feedback and your comments down below. If you're watching this on YouTube, there's a link down below to take our 24 hour test drive. There's also another link to go to our page to look at our helicopter online ground school membership. Please give us a thumbs up and a like on this video and we'll see you on the next one which is going to be helicopter instructor issues. Some things that the members are writing in and telling us about the trouble they're having with certain instructors. So thanks for stopping by and we'll see in the next video.
