#163 Pilot in command it's up to you where to land, or not

Hey, welcome to day 163 Coffee with Kenny. Still having fun? Still having a blast. Your response to all the videos lately have been awesome. This is such a good time. Enjoy doing this every day. And I have a question today from one of our longtime ground school members, Colton who? I'll throw a picture up. He I met Colton at Heli Expo 2018 along with Kyle Parrish, who he recently highlighted in a video. I'll put that video link above and below where the young man is out now flying tours in New York City. Just after a couple of short years of getting his career going, getting his training done, getting his first several jobs, building his time and he's out there doing it. Another one of those videos to prove the naysayers wrong. So his friend Colton that we met, Taz and I and Brian all got to meet these two young men at Heli Expo 2018. Had a great time talking at lunch and referenced my video from the other day yesterday, talking about the brownout that we recently just ran into last week. Colton asked Just wanted to ask you a follow up question. Since you were an EMS pilot, I'm guessing with EMS or off airport rescues, you've had to occasionally land in a brown out or whiteout situation. Can you explain proper techniques to handle the situation to be safe while also completing the mission? Okay, one thing that comes to mind off the first or right off the bat is in the EMS environment that I came from is they said we're not using the term mission anymore because mission implies that this is something you have to do. Okay. So in order to be safe, there are times where you just have to make other decisions or not go or whatever the case is. So we don't. In the company I worked for, we did not use the term mission. And if you think about that, that makes sense. You know, in the military world, a mission is a mission they're going in and getting shot at and saving lives and doing all kinds of things. In a civilian world, we're not normally getting shot at. So the term mission, sometimes they were worried that it would drive people to make bad decisions. Okay, back to this question. I know in your example with your student, it was a practice off airport landing, so it wasn't necessary to land. In this case, I understand the best practice was to pull power and remove yourself from the situation. Exactly. Which is what we did. We flew out of there and everything was good. However, let's say you need to land in that specific spot to rescue the clients. What are the proper techniques to safely Land in a brown out or a white out situation or what are the best practices in these types of situations. I have an answer for this, a really good one, and that is pick another spot. Now, what I want to say, any technique, anything that you use, of course you want to go back to where in the world you're flying. Who is the company you're working for? What does your training tell you about brownouts or whiteouts? Okay, throwing that disclaimer in there first. I know there are some different methods. I've heard some other methods. Even when I was flying ems, I choose the method of starting high and cleaning the area and then landing. I had a military, he was a navy pilot. He said, well, you can also keep on your horizon, on your attitude indicator and go on down to the ground. That one spooks me just a little bit. But I want to say I'm going to give you my opinion and what I did in the five years of EMS flying, what you may or may not do could be different. Again, going back to who are you working for? What are their policies? How are you trained? So to answer Colton's question, in my experience, what we did and snow was a lot more of an issue than dust or brownout due to the fact that we are in northern Indiana. So simply, what we did for snow, you got to remember, snow can be really light and really fluffy. Sometimes snow can be wet. So you're always kind of taking a guess on or at least an educated guess if you're paying attention to the temperature, paying attention to how soft this actually is, the snow. Is there an ice layer over top of the snow? So there's all these things to consider, but the technique we used was start up high, plenty high enough that you could see the snow coming up and hover there, whether it takes you 30 seconds or a minute or two minutes. Clean that area below you, staying high enough that you can keep your visibility and then slowly work your way down bit by bit. And if you're real slow and careful, you'll be able to see as that snow starts to dissipate and start to thin out. And then you can keep coming down, keep coming down very slowly, very carefully. That's what I did and that's what a lot of the other pilots did here in the Midwest. So there is an option. I have one other story about brownout that I've done in the past in ground school, and I believe I even talked about Durham Coffee with Kenny. But we went to land at a off airport, landing at a accident Near a railroad track. But we knew it was summertime, we knew it was dusty. I pre warned the crew, they want us to go in. The fire department asked us to land in this parking lot. I knew it was gravel because I lived several blocks away from where I was going. So I knew that it was a gravel lot and I knew it was going to be dusty. And I pre warned the crew, I don't know if this is going to work. We're going to go very slowly, and if the dust comes up, we're just going to fly away. And that's exactly what happened. And it surprised the firemen on the ground, it surprised everyone. Luckily I was ready, the crew was ready. And when we saw this dust bowl coming up, we simply flew away. And we started way high above treetop level and just started coming down real easy. And when that dust came up, it came up fast. Luckily, we had plenty of time to just fly away. So here's what you do. Pick another landing spot, and I will tell you for what worked for us here for five years in northern Indiana. And I don't remember ever having emergency personnel complain. We have to in that by the 135 regulations, you have to have contact with the emergency crew on the ground. In our case, normally the medic was on the radio while the helicopter pilot's flying, the medics on the radio talking to the ground personnel. Many, many times when we would go to land at a certain area, if we did not like that spot, we would pick another. And this was very common and nobody ever complained. Of course, when you have emergency personnel on the ground, they may pick what is a really good spot or what to them appears to be a good spot. So they're doing the best of their ability to, to pick a good spot that they believe is safe. Now, when you come tooling up in the helicopter and you're at 500 AGL at least, and you're flying circles around any given spot, you see things that the people on the ground can't see. And many times, for example, let's use snow. The area they want you to go to is snow covered. And then you look over here and there's a Walmart parking lot that's freshly cleaned and maybe, maybe it's closed and there's almost nobody in a parking lot whatever reason. Okay? So we would relay to the ground personnel, hey, you know, thanks. We, we see the spot where you're wanting us to land, but we see another area off to the east, 1/4 of a mile that is much safer. It's more open, it's more clear. That's where we would like to go land. And majority of the time they understood, no problem, and they move over and get ready and set up for you to land in another location. That is my best advice. You know, the way Colton answered that, well, how, you know, what's the safest way to land in a brown out or a white out. I think we could all agree that it's a very dangerous situation. And for me, my opinion and what I prefer to do, I'd rather stay high, start to come down and see what's going to happen and if there's any kind of an issue, fly away and pick another spot. And again, I'm going to reiterate the emergency area. Even though it's emergency medical service, we were trained, we're flying cargo. Again, your job as the pilot is to get everyone from point A to point B safely. You don't think about it as a medical emergency because if you do, then you're going to take chances and you're going to do things that you wouldn't normally do if. Let's just say you were hauling boxes of nails. That's the way our EMS company put it to us. They said, guys, you're hauling boxes of nails. Now, this isn't to be, you know, the fact that we don't care. We don't care about people. That's not it. We care about people. If you crash the helicopter trying to land somewhere, you can kill yourself and the whole crew before you even get to your patient. So, you know, we try not to use the term mission because that implies you have to do it no matter what. And I think again, we can all agree brownout and whiteout can be very, very dangerous. Again, you need to look at where are you flying in the world, what are your company policies, how are you trained? Because that could dictate what they want you to do on how to avoid these issues or how to land in them. But I'm going to go back to if you don't like the landing spot, don't do it. And this is across the board, private pilot going for fun EMS no matter what. I can remember another one of the guys that taught me a lot in EMS was a Vietnam era pilot. They'd been flying EMS for a long time. And this gentleman taught me a lot of really cool stuff, right? I mean, he taught me good stuff. And why not, you know, flying for 40 some years, flew in Vietnam. Of course, he's got a lot of great insight and things that he relayed to me. And he said, you know, on another note, kind of along the same lines, going to land off airports or whatever, once you're on the ground and you're on the ground safely, stay put, don't lift the helicopter back up and move it to accommodate someone else. And let's use the example medical crew, let's say over here is the ambulance, and this is where they're going to get the patient, because the patient's in the ambulance and you land over here and they say, oh, can you move closer so we don't have to walk as far? Don't do it again. It's not to be uncaring, but so many times helicopter pilots will wreck the aircraft after they've already landed and then they go to pick up to try to reposition the aircraft just to make somebody's walk easier and then hit an obstacle or get into a dynamic rollover or have some other oddball thing happen. So you, as pilot in command, always have to make the choice. I'm not going to land there. I don't feel comfortable landing there. There is almost always a better spot and a better spot that's not that far away. Five years of EMS never did I, never was I not able to find a place to land. There was always somewhere nearby. And again, the medical crews or the ground crews, the ems, the fire of the police, nobody ever complained when we said, hey, we see that spot. But you know what? Because of some obstacles or because of snow or soft ground, whatever the case is, we chose another place to go land. And it worked out every time. And not once did anybody ever complain. So again, your pilot in command, you have to make the choice. Do what you feel is right. And if your gut says don't do it, just don't do it. There's always a better plan. If your gut's telling you something's iffy, it probably is. That's my best advice on that one. Hey, subscribe to the channel and click the bell so you can be notified of our daily video. We're getting more and more traction. People are digging it. We got Helicopter CheckRide, Amazon number one bestseller, top 10 CheckRide tips, Amazon number one best seller. I authored, co authored with Taz Chrisman, 2018 flight instructor of the Year. Go down below for a link on those. We ship you those books for just shipping and handling. We bought them for you. I just carried another box in today for Heather. A whole box of books just came in and I got more coming this week because we ran almost ran out of my first one and we're getting low on the second. So we have new books coming in. 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