#101 HELICOPTER PILOT | most embarrassing moment with | MICHAEL WALTRIP

Focusing. Yep, it's focusing. All right. I want to have some fun Today on day 101, coffee with Kenny. I am Kenny Keller, creator, Helicopter Line Ground school. Yesterday was day 100, pretty serious. Kind of a long video, covered a lot of stuff and I was really, really motivated and I'm motivated again today. But I want to tell you a couple of things that it's making fun of myself, which that's cool because I know so many of you have been enjoying my stories of my screw ups. But that's how we learn, right? We learn through screwing up. And today I'm kind of excited about this one because I've got a couple stories to tell, but the one of them involves my most embarrassing moment. Two most embarrassing moments. Well, really one most embarrassing moment. The other one just kind of hurt just a little bit. Anytime you change what you do in your method of operation operating a helicopter, you have to put almost change hats again or take special care to go, you know what, we just changed our operation. We just changed what we do. So the first one, that's just kind of a little embarrassing. Not too bad. One reason I always, when I, when I walk away from an aircraft, I always put or on the instrument, I like to put one tail, one blade over the tail. That way I know that the aircraft's been moved, something's going on with it when I've walked away, right when I come back, whether it's in a hangar, on a ramp, and a little hint to what's going on this week. That's one reason why some of the events are happening this week. They're happening is because I'm in a community hangar, right. And you, you never know when your aircraft's gonna get moved, get moved by somebody else and you change that method of operation. You never know what's going to happen. And currently I have a spot marked out with tape on the floor so I know exactly where the helicopter should be when I back it in with the dolly. And one day when we changed something, helicopter got moved and it was in a different spot. And as I was backing up, I thought I had plenty of clearance and I stuck the tail boom. Or the guard on the back through a window in the hangar. Okay. That was aircraft that I owned and I felt really stupid. Luckily the helicopter wasn't damaged. I just broke the window. But again, anytime you change something from the way you've, you normally do, it expect that something bad can happen. Okay? So I want to go to my most embarrassing moment and this is one where I Know, some people are going to spank me down the comments because I wasn't doing what the PoH said. But in the real world, occasionally that happens. And this involved fuel valves. Okay, I'm gonna use give you two examples. In the instrument, everybody I know just leaves fuel valve on all the time, right? In the Jet Ranger, I flew at a company with other pilots. Everybody just left the fuel valve on all the time. Okay? We know the POH for the 206B3. There's a time to turn it on, turn it off through the checklist. But at that company, every single pilot just left the fuel valve on all the time. Everybody did that. Well, a different owner comes in, takes over the company, and somebody questions, why are all you guys not following the checklist? So decisions made that we're all going to start using the check. We all use the checklist, but we're actually going to go fuel valve on and fuel valve off in the checklist when the factory checklist says to do that. Okay? So all of us are not doing it the way the POH says, All right? It's just what we did. So spank me in the comments if you want, but there's a whole slew of pilots and we're all doing the same thing, right? So I get this chart, EM or 135charter one day, and it's for a, you know, NASCAR celebrity, but I really didn't follow NASCAR at the time. And you can spank me again on this one. And I was going to fly Michael Waltrip, and I didn't know who Michael Waltrip was. Now I can tell you, over the years, I've seen Michael Waltrip everywhere. I see him at the napa store and I see him everywhere I go. It's Michael Waltrip, right? At this point in time, I didn't know who Michael Waltrip was. So I go down to another airport from our home base airport to pick up Michael Waltrip and his crew. And they come out and I do a walk around. I'm doing everything by the book, trying to be as professional as possible. He has two guys with him. Michael climbs in the back with one of his guys. Another guy gets up front, and this guy's even helpful. He's like, hey, I can help tune radios and stuff because we fly in helicopters all the time. I'm like, cool. So I let him do that, and that was all awesome. So we go out, I'm doing everything by the book. We get in the Jet Ranger and the. The fuel valve was off as it says with the checklist, I'm nervous, right? Even though I didn't know who he was, I knew he was a big deal. So I'm trying to do everything right, but force of habit, I go through the startup sequence for the Jet Ranger. I do not turn the fuel valve on, okay? So when I get to engine start, I fire it up, starts to run, and you can imagine what happens very shortly after I start, dies. Okay? So I'm sitting there and I'm like, uh, oh, I realized what I did, right? So in the moment, I'm nervous, I'm embarrassed. I have a celebrity on board. What do I do? I don't say a word. Nobody says anything. I go back to the checklist, and I start back at the beginning and go through it again, okay? Which is. This is a good tip. The way we're trained, when you screw up a start, something out of sequence happens. Go back and start at the beginning. So I go through the whole startup, everything goes good. We take off, and I fly him over to a field where they're having an event, and they have the corn maze, right. Of his race car made in the corn. And so there's people everywhere, and they have a spot for us to land, and we land. I ask everybody to stay, of course, inside the helicopter till it's all shut down. And they're all cool with that. So we're going through the shutdown, the blades are slowing down, and Michael leans up through, and he goes, hey, how come the aircraft died when we first started up? So I fessed up, told him what I did, didn't make a big deal out of it, but can you imagine how stupid I felt? Can you imagine how embarrassed I felt? So moral of the story is, anytime you change your daily operation of the way you do something, once it's ingrained in, you expect to make a mistake. Okay? So again, this is with the fuel valve, and I understand this is an important topic, but I'm also going to say in the instrument, all the instruments I've flown for years, we all just leave the fuel valve off. Even though there's a point where the checklist says, turn it on, turn it off. And there's some reasons why we do that. And even mechanics are like, just leave it off or leave it on. So I'm always preaching, poh, poh, poh, poh. I'm admitting to a time here where we veered from what the Poh said, and then we went back to doing what we're supposed to do, and it caused Me a screw up on the startup. So again, I just want to caution you again, anytime you're switching aircraft, left pedal to right pedal, jumping from airplane to helicopter, you change your method of the way you start or shut the helicopter down. Anytime you change something, know that it can be a problem for you. And this goes back to the stress part of it too. When we're stressed, we go back to the way we were trained. I was stressed that day knowing that I was hauling a celebrity and it was a big deal even though I didn't know who he was. Again, I've seen his name everywhere now, so that that makes me feel kind of stupid. But anyway, I've made a living out of this, right? And something cool happened at Heli Expo. One of my non fans ran into one of my HOGS members somewhere, right? And this guy starts bashing me and starts bashing Hogs and this member sent me an email after the fact and this female member actually, and she was kind of cool and she said, hey, you know what's kind of neat, Kenny? I was talking to this guy who's not a big HOGS fan at Heli Expo and he's telling me about all your screw ups and she goes, I kind of laugh because as HOGS members, we already know your screw ups. We already know about your failures. I thought, you know what, that's really cool that a HOGS member reached out to me to tell me about this guy bashing me at Heli Expo that, you know, he's telling her about all my screw ups over the years and she's like, yeah, well we kind of already know can. He already tells us about a lot of his screw ups. So I hope that's a valuable day 101 again, I got a big day ahead of me, big week ahead of me and I wanted to do something kind of like get through quick today. Have some fun with it. Sun's coming up. Day 101. Going strong. Go down below. If you'd like to take our helicopter land ground school for a 24 hour test flight for a private commercial instrument or CFI. 24 hour free test flight. You can go and check out the training, see what it's all about. Keep it as long as you like. Cancel anytime. If you want to Cancel before the 24 hour free trial is just remove your credit card from settings or end your subscription to PayPal. Seven years online, hundreds of members. This is a blast. We do have a big professional pilot pass package. I'm gonna throw out the code again today because I'm kind of feeling frisky. KK 25 off will save you 25% off the professional pilot membership that doesn't expire. Keep that training as long as you want. And that includes the private, the commercial, the instrument and the cfi. That's pretty good savings on that one. And we have 100% money back guarantee that I'm really super proud of, been in place for seven years. We never argue, we don't hassle you, we just refund your money. That's simple. So I'm going to get on my day like and subscribe to the channel. Leave me your comments down below what you think of my, of my Michael Waltrip screw up. It's funny now, right? For a long time I didn't want to talk about it, but years later, hey, I can talk about it because we all learn from our mistakes, right? And all of you are learning from all the dumb stuff that I've done. And I do want you to know that I am actually pretty decent in the aircraft. And I'm actually an okay helicopter pilot. And, and I do know how to do some things pretty well. And so even though I'm sharing my screw ups, sometimes I actually do pretty good in the aircraft. All right, let's wrap this dude up. See you tomorrow, day 102. Like subscribe. Put your comments down below. I want to hear about your screw ups. Hell yeah.