#13 Neighbor Called FAA Reference My Helicopter EMS Hospital Approach

All right, trying this again. I just tried a couple minutes ago and lost the feed but I was on a roll. Now I'm gonna do it again. I got cut off. I'm gonna give you a quick story in a minute about how I got the FAA called on me on an approach to the hospital and how they were horrible and they come out and scream and yelled at me. I'm just teasing. It ends up better than that. But this video today is inspired by a question from one of our members about Flying neighborly. And I'm going to tell you about my experience with the FAA and how that went when I had a complaint. So this members named Brian. So this is for you, Brian. He said, I'm really enjoying your videos that are addressing commonly asked questions. I have one that I hope you can respond to. We're doing these every day. I am kenny by@helopterground.com by the way helicopter line ground school this if you're first to one of our videos. He said how do you make yourself aware of them as a pilot? Noise abatement areas at the airport. I did my initial training. I was made aware of the area by my instructor. When I asked local pilots, a different pilot at a different airport about them. They told me one area of a concern, one area of concern. But it wasn't listed in the AFD chart supplement or in any notam. I want to fly neighborly and not have any restrictions added by the faa. Any advice? I do if you want to go to an official publication, that's really good. And I just checked it out this morning and I just searched Fly Neighborly because I knew the FAA had something called Fly Neighborly and it comes up as Fly Neighborly Final. After the video I'll put it up here. Let me give you a quick view. So short little tutorial. I went through it. It's pretty good. They go through and there's audio to it and also a video as well. Then they talk through the science behind helicopter noise and environment and what you should do to fly neighborly. So instead of me trying to create a big great big presentation, this is a short video that's really good. Again, I just typed in FAA Fly Neighborly and it comes up as Flying Neighborly Final. And there's some others you'll find in search. But this is the FAA's one. It's pretty good. I went through it so you can get some really good information in there. So what I tell you is use common sense, be smart about it. You know, if you're Going to, into an airport and there's less houses over on this side than there is on this side and you can safely do it versus wind, you know, avoid the houses on the other side. You know, there's a million billion circumstances surrounding anytime you're landing. So as he said, sure, you need to check your, you know, AFD anywhere you're going. It's your responsibility as pilot in command to find out everything about that place that you're landing. So certain airports are going to have noise abatement rules. Most of these things are going to be posted. If you go there where there's a noise sensitive area, but it's not posted, it's not out there in any of the literature around there, then, you know, just use your best instincts, do what's smart. You know, avoid blade chop. We all like blade chop, right? It sounds cool in the helicopter when you're getting aggressive on the maneuvers and you know, they're making those old blades chopped, it's fun. But realize that's one of the things that really upsets people is that blade chop. So using good common sense, number one, I mean, again, here's a, with the faa, here's something you can go through, but use common sense. And in any time that you're going to land somewhere, if you've done your groundwork, you've checked publications, if you're going out somewhere off airport, you visited the site, you've checked on local ordinances or any kind of thing, any kind of issues, and the FAA gets a call later if you can say, oh man, hey, so and so on that day I checked these publications, I made these phone calls, I checked with local ordinances, you know, with the local community. I did, I did everything I could do. And I thought, you know, I was going in using good practices, being as safe as I could. You're probably never going to have a problem, right? And so let me give you an example of this. I'm flying ems and this is the actual hospital I was at when I went first went to work to this hospital. Of course, the hospital administration is, you know, telling us what we're supposed to do and not do, even though we don't work for them, right? We're a contractor providing them a service. But I'm there with the head honcho, the, you know, male nurse that's in charge of a helicopter program who's not a pilot. The case a lot of times, right? And then the PR guy's there and so the PR guys tell me, well, when you go to land Here at our airport. You know, this route in here, actually, let me pull this out a little bit where you can see a little bit better. There was two proposed routes because they had a neighbor who was often calling in complaints about the helicopters coming and going, and they showed us two routes in. So I'm going to give you just an example and try to make it, you know, for simple purposes. But let's say the two routes are. Okay, we'd like you to come in this way. We'd like you to come in this way. All right, makes sense. Hopefully you can see this, all right, because there's a neighbor over here out here somewhere that has a problem if you fly over his house and he calls the faa. So, you know, the FAA guy or the PR guy tells me about this and I go, okay, you know, we can try to do that most of the time. That sounds great, but what if, you know, the wind is directly this direction and it's a high wind? I'm going to need to come over an area more this way. So the hospital PR guy, what's he telling me? Well, I'm giving them your phone number, and every time they call, I'm gonna have them call you. I'm like, dude, whatever. That's what you got to do, right? You know, that was the hospital's attitude. Well, whatever. That guy never liked me, and I never liked him after that anyway, so doesn't matter. Point of story is, I get a complaint, called on me one night, going the next day I landed due to when, Due to safety. I did what I had to do. We did normally land the proposed routes when able, when, when provided. So the day pilot, you know, tells me when I come in the next night about the complaint, FAA showed up. Well, vice versa, same thing happened. We switched nights every other rotation, right? So when I came back to work or when I go to work one day, same thing happened the previous night. FA just shows up out of the blue and says, hey, we received a call about your pilot last night that he landed over this, you know, noise sensitive area. And I'm like, okay, well, let's take a look real quick. And we checked the winds. I'm like, well, I can see by last night, you know, he would have chose that route, you know, due to the fact of where the wind was and they were cool with it. They said, yeah, we realize that and we understand. We know you guys are trying to normally be careful when a wind's in a particular direction, you may not be able to use a proposed route, but we still have to come out. When somebody complains, we have to come out and check up on it. So just giving you an example how using proposed routes is always going to be good, right? You want to fly neighborly. If there's a proposed route in there somewhere, you're going to want to use it. But you're still piloting command. You still are in charge of any time that you make an approach to wherever it is you want to do it. Number one, the safest means possible, right? With your conditions, your wind, your load factor, whatever's going on with that particular flight, you need to do the best you can do. Now, if it's somewhere that's restricted, Right. Okay, that's another whole. Another whole. Another whole subject I would never tell you. Go fly through a restricted or prohibited area. Talking in general, flying neighborly is use common sense, Investigate the landing area as much as you can, do all the things that a good pilot is expected to do. And then when you get a complaint made, right. You did your best. In my 20 years, I've had an interaction with the FAA quite a few times. And the FAA has always been reasonable. You know, they've never come out and just started acting like a bunch of idiots. They've never done that. Anytime something's come up in my flying career with the faa, they've always, they always treat you fairly. You know, they just want to. They got to come out, follow up a complaint, talk to you. So as long as you're doing the right thing trying to fly neighborly, try to avoid blade chop. You know, we've all had those days where we want to say, well, you know, don't buy a house near the airport if you don't like it. You know, well, that doesn't stop the complaint. So it's easy to have that attitude. But. But if you truly want to fly neighborly, you want to use good common sense, good practices, again, I would advise checking out that fly neighborly from the faa. You can even search in there Fly neighborly final. But after this was done uploading, I'll go below and I'll put that link down below so you can go see it. You know, just go direct to it if you want. I'd like to hear your comments about flying neighborly. Good, bad things that have happened to you. Funny story, good story, bad story, whatever. These daily videos are getting pretty popular and we're having a blast doing them. And daily I have people think, you know, email me and go, hey, man, I'm enjoying this. Can you do a video on this. So we're hitting a lot of things that are either asked a lot or things that are kind of important. But maybe there's not a lot of info out there on, on that subject yet or maybe we haven't done it. Maybe we have, but answering a lot of questions. So helicopter land ground school. Put a link down there below for helicopter land ground school. We have private commercial CFI instrument. We have a professional pilot package where you get everything. There's monthly options and there's also yearly and then the big professional pilot package. I'm also going to put links down there below for our two Amazon number one best selling books. My first one that I did four years ago, Helicopter Checkride, Amazon number one bestseller. Then this past summer I did one with Taz Chrisman, 2018 Flight Instructor of the Year. We did the top 10 checkride tips. Get Amazon number one best seller in four hours. So I'll put those links below for those books. We bought a whole pile of them. So we have a stock, we own them. We'll ship them to you for seven bucks shipping and handling. Right now we're shipping them anywhere for seven bucks. We're gonna make a change here in the future where we'll probably do keep it $7 for us and go to $14 international just because we're finding international shipping a lot of times can be as much as like 25 bucks. So still great value, you know, at $7 we shipping you the book and it'll still be a good value going overseas for $14. It still may, you know, be a few bucks out of, out of, you know, the ground school pocket. So go below for those links. Please leave your comments down below. 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