#178 How I became an EMS Helicopter Pilot

All right, I'm on a roll. Day 178. This is going to be, I don't know, down and dirty. We're going to go right to it. Going to try to do this with no editing at all, because I got a big day. And I want to share something with you about becoming an ems. EMS helicopter pilot. And coming from Andrew, and this is a great question that I'm sure many of you will be interested in, many of you starting out. That is the dream, right? To be an EMS pilot. I'm going to answer his questions and I'm going to throw in how I did it. And the path I took is very common for a lot of people. It's not the only path. There are different paths. But I want to mention first, I'm on natural high today. You know, things have been going so good, and Heather's off with a dentist, and, you know, she was having a little bit of a down day. And I said, you know what? It's going to get better. And it always does. And I want to mention, just come in a motivational mood, my good friend here, Dr. Nick, that owns this beautiful instrument behind me. His dad always gave us these little quotes. His dad lived into his 80s and 20 years I've known Nick. He'd always tell me these little things his dad would say. And his dad said, no matter what it is you're going through, good or bad, don't worry, because it won't last. And, you know, you can take that positively. I take it as a very positive statement, because life goes up and you ride the wave, man, when things are going good. And you know there's always going to be things that's going to come along in life and kick you in the ass, whether it's financial or a loss of a family member or whatever it is. You know, people that go around pretending their life is just grand, it's usually a show, right? Because everybody's got issues. You got to get up every day, keep going, go for your dreams, do whatever it is you want to do in life and ride the wave, man, and enjoy it when times are good and know that there's going to be another bump along the road that's going to come along. But if you just keep chugging along, you ride the wave when it's good and when things are tough, you just keep going. You just keep going and you just keep going. That's all you can do. And that's one way to, I don't know, enjoy your life and make the best of it. Right. So, Andrew, this is a great question. He said, hi, Kenny, I'd come across your website and YouTube upon my own research to get into becoming a helicopter pilot and more specifically, a commercial EMS pilot. Awesome. I'm a commercial pilot. I've flown ems and I'm going to tell you how I did it. It's something I've been thinking about for some time, but never been committed. Now being 26 years old and working as a firefighter EMT the last few years. Awesome. Andrew, if you don't know yet, I have past fire department experience and police department experience, and I was also in the towing service and we did extrication. So we even ran that kind of like ems. I talk about that in Helicopter Checkride. I talk about questions asked of me being an EMS helicopter pilot. And we have some of these videos on YouTube directly from the book. Those chapters. I'll plug this book at the end. You can get that for just shipping and handling. And throughout my videos over the years, I've talked about my EMS career and I've talked about ups and downs and all the different things, and I've given you bits and pieces of how I did it. So I'll kind of do a quick rundown today as I'm answering his questions just so you can see how I did it. He's 26. Note, Andrew, I didn't start till I was 32. Okay, I started 32. I did it. You're 26. You got time, right? And I think you can do it in your 30s. I think you can do it in your 40s, and I think you can even still make it in your 50s. People are flying longer, living longer. There's a shortage of EMS pilots, man. The other day a guy said, I'm 50. I could never do it. I'm. I'm like, man, I think you could. I think you could. All right, so back to Andrew's question. Now, I don't know if I'm in the right place by asking you, but I'm interested in starting flight school out here in Vegas. You came exactly to the right place, Andrew. Taz Chrisman works at airwork Las Vegas. Tas Chrisman is 2018 flight instructor of the Year. He does our instrument videos and our instrument training course. He's one of my very close personal friends. We authored a book together called Top 10 Checkride Tips. So you want to fly in the Las Vegas area, you need to go see Taz Christman and Air Work Las Vegas. It's that simple. How do you get started. You call Air Work Las Vegas and you schedule an introductory flight and tell them you want to fly with Taz. That's how you get started, man. Tune in every day to copy with Kenny. This is day 178, so we've got 178 videos, including this one. Daily topics talking about becoming a helicopter pilot. The struggles, careers, ups, downs, everything. So you are absolutely, Andrew, in the right place. We have a community, and that community is called Helicopter Online Ground School. We have student pilots coming in brand new. We have rusty CFIs, meaning we have people that join that. Hey. They say, hey, Kenny, I haven't flown in five years. I'm a cfi and I want to get back into it. They utilize our training to go in and freshen up their knowledge. And then there's all kinds of stories in between. You are with a community of people. Now you're with Helicopter Only Ground school. Okay. You can consume our daily videos. I have over 600 videos on YouTube, so there's tons of free training out there. And when you get ready to hit the helicopter ground school, you get flying. You need help along the way. We have a helicopter ground school. The link's down below. You can utilize that when you're ready. You don't need it today. When you decide you need some help with the ground, we're here. And Taz can help you, guide you along that path. Because Taz is not only one of our instructors, Taz is one of our helicopter land ground school members. That's how I met Taz. He's from Indiana, just like me, but he lives and works in Vegas. He flies for the Air Force, and he's an airplane cfi, helicopter cfi. And flies everything underneath the sun. And he's a nice guy with no chip on the shoulder. So you're in the right place. Contacting Taz, he says, I have absolutely zero experience, but maybe you can point me in the right direction on getting started, which I just did. Any word of advice? Helps for someone becoming a newcomer like myself. Thank you for your time. If you get this, Andrew, Awesome. Great question, Andrew. Again, so many people ask these questions. Okay, so try to do a quick rundown. Here's what I did. Here's what most people do. I started in the late 90s flying. Okay. Took me four years from off the street to get to certified flight instructor. Once I got to certified flight instructor, I got my first job. My first job lasted about a month, and then nine, 11 happened. Okay. So then I had to go out and beat the Bushes and find a job because it was one of the hardest times in history to get a job as a helicopter pilot. And I did it. And I did it by selling myself. I emailed every single company within a three or four or five hour driving distance to where I live and I got a job when almost nobody in the country was hiring. Okay? So to get started during that time, I flew Robinsons, I flew a bell 47, I flew a Schweitzer and I flew Instrom's. So by the time I got to my cfi, I had a good basis of helicopters under my belt. I get my first job and, well, first one lasted a month, then I got another one out of state. I worked at that place off and on for about five years. So I was a road dog. Lived in Indiana, Would drive to Ohio four and a half hours Monday morning, four and a half hours, back home Friday night. I did that every week for years. For a little while, I went back and helped the school. When things got slow at that school, I went back and helped the school in Chicago. So sometimes I'd go between Indiana, I'd go to Chicago and I'd go to Ohio. Did whatever I took or whatever it took to get my time, get my hours. And that job in Ohio got me my turbine time and got me almost to the 2000 hours. Came back to Indiana, got a job flying the instrument near home to get to the 2000 hour mark where I could go to become an EMS helicopter pilot. During that time when I was building my hours again, I was flying in Indiana, Illinois and Ohio, anywhere I could to build my time. Flew rides on the weekends. During the summertime, I had opportunities to fly helicopters at festivals, giving rides. I did that. You do anything you can, you become a road dog and you go anywhere and everywhere you can to get helicopter time. And you do what it takes and you sell yourself. There's going to be people along the way that are going to whine and complain and say, you can't do it, it's too hard, it's too expensive, blah, blah, blah. Well, they're naysayers, okay? It's like anything in life. If you want to go for the dream and you want to do it, you do it. You don't wait on your friends, your family, you don't wait on people to support you. Some family will help you or support you, and some of your close friends will support you. But most people are going to become jealous and most people are going to tell you that you can't do it. So you're at the perfect age. I don't even want to say perfect age. Any age is good to start flying, okay? Any age. And we've proved that lately with people flying in their 50s or 60s or 70s, it's freaking incredible. This 178 Days of Coffee with Kenny has changed my life along with other people's, a lot of other people's. So many people reaching out to us, asking us questions. And not only have I helped other people, you've all helped me, right? You've helped me become a better person. You've helped coffee with Kenny has helped me in so many ways, it's not even funny. I can't even start to tell you. So, okay, back to how I did it. So that took me a course of about took me four years to go off the street to cfi. Okay, so there's four years to get on my ratings. Some people do it in a little as six months if they have the money. We've got videos on the COVID of my book Helicopter Checkride. Travis did it at Sevier County Choppers in Tennessee just recently. That's Travis Gregg. Kyle Parish, a guy I met at Heli Expo 2018, is now flying helicopter tours in New York City. He did the same thing. Both these guys did it in six months. Kyle had his private and had about a six year break, but then went back and mailed the rest of them in six months. Got there and got flying proof. If you got the wheel, you can do it, you can get out there. So jumping out of sequence here. So that's four years for me to get to the cfi. Right? But I get those jobs. So from the time I started working as a cfi, took me about five years to get hired as a helicopter EMS pilot. Okay, that's probably pretty average. Some guys can do it quicker or girls can do it quicker. There are some places you can go where you can fly a lot and you go out, I mean, you'll be flying seven days a week and busting your butt and humping like crazy and you might get to that 2000 hours in a couple years. You know, most I ever flew in one year was 600 hours and that was humping it. You could do more. Not saying you can't, but that one year of the 600 really helped me advance that career. So to get to the 2000 hour point took me 5 years. 5 years flying commercially. I got hired as an EMS helicopter pilot. Along that way I got turbine time and all the different experiences that helped me move into the EMS career. Even in that five years, I was involved in a helicopter accident where a helicopter destroyed itself, spit me out, threw me out on the ramp and I had a back injury and I had to take some time off from flying and I came back from that. And don't think that wasn't hard to get over because it was so. I've had the struggles. I talk about them every day. Everybody else has the struggles. I hope, Andrew, that helps and hopes that motivates you so you're in the right place. Continue every day to tune in to coffee with Kenny. We do a daily video every day. I don't see myself stopping anytime in the near future. As long as you all keep liking clicking that thumbs up button below the video, click that thing for me. And as long as you guys subscribe and click the bell and you keep asking the questions, we're going to keep this going. If it dies off and nobody comes around to view, eventually I'll probably quit. So as long as this thing keeps rolling, we're going to keep doing it. So, Andrew, I think that's going to give you a great start again. Schedule your first flight, start learning. And I'm also going to put a link down below for a video playlist. These are free videos that are already on YouTube but we have a sequence of about 16 videos and they're older videos now, but the information is still good and I put them in a playlist that basically says how you get started, you know, the cost for a private, hours for commercial. How does ground school work? How does it help you study? So there's 16 videos in a playlist and I'll put that link down below that anybody can watch. And that's for somebody who's brand new, who's asking the basic questions. Just getting started. It's free content and it just kind of walks you through. Not only how you can utilize our ground school to help you in your career and help you save money and help you advance in your training, but it's also general tips about learning to fly and going out and getting your introductory flight and getting started and choosing your aircraft and all kinds of awesome stuff. So it's a big day and I'm going to move on. Please like and subscribe to the channel. Have to thank every single one of you. I'm riding the wave right now and I'm going to ride it as long as I can. Just knowing that along the way there's going to be some bumps in the road and there always will be, you know, as long as we're alive, we're going to have ups and we're going to have downs. But I'm living proof that anybody can do it. I'm not especially smart. I'm not really especially good at really anything other than I'm a good storyteller and I'm good at relating stories of how I did it. And I'm pretty good in the aircraft and I'm pretty good with the ground school. Funny thing is, ground school is how I make my living. And I feel like I'm better in the aircraft than I am a ground instructor. But with that being said, because I struggled so hard and I had to study so hard and I failed my first checkride, there are so many reasons why I just, I created what I have and it came out of that first failure because I'm like all of you. Most of you who struggled, got beat down, you know, had this bad happen, that bad happen, blah, blah, blah. You take those bad things and you learn, right? Failed the check ride, been through a helicopter accident, been through the financial stress, but it's all for a goal, right? It's all to better yourself. And one more thing before I go, I don't think I've mentioned this in a video, and if I have, it's been a long time and I recently somebody mentioned this. It's really cool how becoming a pilot changes your life, right? I became a law enforcement officer as very early in my 20s, very young man. I become a police officer. That helped me in so many areas of my life and things that I've continued today that I learned at the police academy, right? And you take a lot of those experiences and they help me. They help me in my helicopter career, they help me study. I mean, there's so many reasons that that helped me move on. And then becoming a pilot changes everything as well. Once you become a pilot or even before you get your license, once you start learning, you look at weather differently, you find yourself in your car clearing your tail. Oh, I mean, clearing your trunk, you know, clearing left and right. There are so many things and benefits to becoming a pilot that I suggest to anyone, whether you're interested in helicopters or airplanes. And if you're motivated and you want to do this, man, you need to go try it and you need to go do it, because becoming a pilot helps you so many other areas of your life. So many. It's just awesome. And back to the one more thing. The question from the guy who want to know more about my resume. I told you all the helicopters I flew to get to the CFI point. As I was a commercial pilot, CFI building my time, I got an opportunity to fly the Jet Ranger at the school I worked at. After 80 hours of flying along with the owner, owner had to take a break from flying because it was a man who wanted to own the company. She became pregnant, couldn't fly the news anymore. Well, guess what, here's Kenny with 80 hours in the Jet Ranger and like, hey, well let's, let's get you insured, let's get you on there and let's let you fly the news reporting. So I did flight instructing and I did news reporting and I did 135 charter in the Jet Ranger. That's how I got my start with the turbine time. Then I got an opportunity to fly the Instrum 480. I've always flown Instrums. I went to a specialized school where I was. I'm now factory authorized to fly all the Instrum products, including the Instrum turbine. I picked up some turbine time because I got that opportunity and that's how I got my first EMS job. So during that time I was flying Switzer's, Enstrom's, little bit of Robinson and Jet Ranger. Then when I got my EMS job, I got the opportunity to fly the BK117 for two and a half years which was. Those are kind of a dying breed now and they're dying off. But what a wonderful aircraft. The heavy duty truck helicopters or heavy duty truck of EMS helicopters. God, that gives me goosebumps. That thing was incredible. I love the BK117. And then my second two and a half years in EMS, I got to fly the EC135.6 million dollar aircraft. Got the opportunity to do that for two and a half years. Very cool aircraft, new, you know, a lot of electronic gadgetry and that was all cool. But man, it wasn't the powerhouse and it wasn't the heavy duty of the BK117. Man, that helicopter was so cool. So that's what I flew during that five years in VMs with BK117 and EC135. So that for the question that what's my resume? There you go, there's what I've flown. That's how I made my career path happen. Most people would do it very similar to that. Get private, get commercial, get instrument in between private and commercial. If you can, get certified flight instructor, get CFI job, start teaching build hours. Build hours and keep moving up. And you just keep moving up the ladder. And you keep taking jobs, get experiences as you can, and you just keep moving up that ladder because it's going to take you about 2,000 hours of helicopter time to get that EMS job. So you're going to have to work at it, and it's going to take a little time. Going to have to be a road dog, and you're going to have to work for peanuts. Just part of it. You got to do this job and go into becoming a helicopter pilot because you want to do it, because it's in your heart and you love it. You can't do it because you're worried about how much money you're going to make. Money's come up now and it's gotten better, but the amount of money you put into training is high and the time and effort you got to put in it is high. And you're not going to make much money for the first two, three or four or five years. It will get better with time. But do not go into becoming a helicopter pilot because you think you're going to make a lot of money. You got to do it because you love it. It's in your heart, it's in your guts, in your soul. You want to have to become it. Do it and do whatever it takes. Take the ups and downs, take the struggles. Put your nose to the grindstone and do it every day. Get up and just go after it. Oh, yeah, one more time. I keep doing this July 4th. Self started July 1st. This is July 2nd, ends Sunday night. And because I love the number three, it comes up so many times in life, I consider it my lucky number. There's a whole section in this book, helicopter checkride on the helicopter threes. When you're learning there are so many things that three. There's three types of, you know this and there's three things to Song of Power. And there's three situations that will get you a sling of power. Most common, there's three. Three, three across the board. I'm going to reshoot those soon and maybe we'll even do that as a copy with Kenny series within these daily videos. Because it was a lot of fun. I did it back in 2012. Anyway, back to the three. Our July sell is 33% off because I love the number three and because I'm pushing helicopter checkride. It's chapter 14. Should have made it chapter 13, right? No, chapter 14 is the EMS thing. Anyway, there's a whole section on there on the helicopter threes. We're going to reshoot those that's why I like the number three. So the cell is 33% off. Go below this video and there's links down below for our yearly private commercial, CFI and instrument and our big professional pilot package. Those links take you directly to the sales page and you'll see the full price marked off. When you enter your information, you'll see the 33% off price will pop up after you fill out, I believe your email. Along with that becomes or along with that comes a 24 hour trial that you don't get charged. You could remove your credit card if it's not something you want to continue with. Otherwise you keep it. And then you'll be billed yearly on the yearly. So that's on sale for 33% off. And the private professional pilot includes private pilot, commercial pilot, instrument pilot, certified flight instructor. It's unlimited. You keep it forever and it will be there for you. For the professional pilot route, guys like Andrew that want to do all the ratings, the professional pilot package is the best because it's going to be there for you until you're done with your ratings. There's no recurring membership, there's no other payments. A one time fee, that's 33% off. That's down below as well in the description box. You can also go to helicopterground.com which is below in the box and enter the code. If you just go through the standard sales page, you're not on the special sales page. You enter the code 330FF for 33 off, that's 33% off. Enter that code in there and it'll show you the discounted price on the yearly professional pilot memberships. So two ways to get the July 4th discount. It's just seven years online. This is amazing. And you're amazing. You all are amazing. I created this out of my failures and it's awesome. And we've been able to help so many people and you've all helped me too. So I'm almost gonna get teary eyed with it, you know. Seven years online, it's awesome. Awesome. You are now with a community of helicopter pilots brand new to rusty old timers like me. I'm getting there. All right, we'll see you in day 179. Oh, that sounds cool. Day 179. All right, like subscribe to the channel, put your comments down below, go below the video and click that thumbs up and we will see you in day 179. Peace out.