Kenny Keller teaches the hovering square, a drill where pilots practice hovering, pickups, setdowns, and turns around taped squares on the ground. It works in light to moderate wind and shows progress fast.
I'm gonna move it away from quickly. Hey, Kenny. With Helicopter Only Ground School, I'll show you. I did this video a few years ago in the helicopter, so I'll put that link below if you want to go watch us do this in the aircraft. But it's a couple years old and I'll bet a lot of you have never seen it. So I can feel like I can describe it just about as well in here with the our little toy helicopter as much as I can do it out in the helicopter because I can really think about it. So I'm Kenny Keller, creator Helicopter Line Ground School. We've been doing daily videos. People have been emailing me, they've been digging it, liking it. So each day I'm hitting a topic, things that just can help you in your training. So the hovering square pattern, whether you're brand new or a rusty pilot brushing up your skills, this is one of my favorite absolute techniques to build your skills. And what's fun with a new student when you do this, I don't do it every time, but you do it maybe once a week. And then they see their progress build and it gives them confidence. So what I do, luckily I was taught this many years ago. We're going to use Plymouth Airport as example. Where we do it, there's squares in the concrete where they're cut, you can see them. And I actually put tape on them so the student knows exactly where the squares are. And we simply start by doing pick a square, pick it up, do a nice smooth hover taxi over to the first spot, set it down, pick it up, clear the tail, move over to the next spot, set it down, pick it up again. So as you're doing this, you know you're getting experience in all directions. Now, I wouldn't do it on a high wind day. I would do on more of a day with some wind so that you're getting practice with every wind direction. If it was really windy, I wouldn't do it. And yes, we normally practice pickups and set downs into the wind, but this is really good for your skills. Then pick it up, do a turn, whichever way you prefer or method you use in the aircraft you're flying back around, set down, each one picking up. And the beauty of this is as simple as it is. Everybody I've showed absolutely loves it. And again you're getting picking up, setting down turns, hovering, practice, you're getting a little bit of everything. So for an example with a new student, what's fun is, you know, I show it to them early on and explain to them, look, you're just learning to hover, so this isn't going to be pretty and they'll be all over the place, you know, and it'll be really messy. But then as they make progress, you show them a week later, a month later, and they see their skills improve, they get really excited and then they're like, oh my God, thank you, thank you for showing me that. I use it. I like to use it. When I haven't flown in a little while and I'm going out and brushing up my skills, I use it. So if you have any tips for learning to hover, anything along those lines, or anything else, ground or flying wise, put them in the comments below. We'd like to hear your tips and tricks. Hovering is a big one, right? Everybody struggles with hovering. This is one that I like to cover. So again, if you want to see me doing this in aircraft, I'll put that link down below the video. It's an older video but still pretty good. You can go view that. So I want to talk about our memberships real fast. We have private commercial, CFI instrument. You can go monthly, yearly, or you can go professional pilot where you get them all. That's unlimited. The monthly and yearly. You need to know that you get 24 hour trial on any of the memberships. Enter your credit card. You have 24 hours to view all the training. Remove your credit card before the end of the 24 hours. You'll be billed nothing. If you decide it's not right for you, keep the training as long as you like. Cancel any time. So put your comments down below. Subscribe to the channel. Click that bell so that you can be notified of our daily videos. Like I said, this is becoming pretty popular and fun. I was gonna go to the airport today and do this in the office, but it's cold today and the dolly's broken so I had to cancel my flight anyway. So click the bell, give us a like. Put your comments down below and we'll see you next video.
