#187 How often do you do a preflight check in real life?

Hey, welcome to day 187 Coffee with Kenny. Pretty good question here for someone just starting out. Let me put the checklist back down. Grab the phone. This is from Ulrich in Germany. Love how we connect with people from all over the world. Freaking awesome. So I am Kenny Keller, creator helicopter online ground school. We've been online seven years. We have four courses, Private, commercial, CFI and instrument. All online courses for all those ratings. Been online seven years and we're very proud of all the people we've been able to help with their helicopter ratings. So here's a question, dear Kenny. Here's a question for copy with Kenny. How often do you pre flight check in real Life? Alright. Ask 10 different people and you get 10 different answers and probably half of them are going to be lies. Okay, what should you do? How often do you pre flight? You need to pre flight every single flight. And you know, thinking about student training, private pilots flying commercially, immediately to my mind I think about as an EMS helicopter pilot flying a $6 million aircraft, flying, you know, pretty important flights to go, transport people to hospitals. You got a pre flight every single morning. And if you are caught flying the aircraft without pre flighting, you'd probably be fired. Okay, so you need to do a pre flight every single flight. Okay. In the real world, are there people that don't pre flight? Mm, yep. And there's plenty of accident reports out there where the accident report states that the pilot didn't pre flight and didn't find something wrong with the aircraft and crashed and killed himself. Okay, so starting out for the day, you need a full entire pre flight. And again, this is for the beginners, just starting out pros, experienced pilots, you already know this. Most helicopters have a checklist. You're going to have a checklist in the pilot's operating handbook for the helicopter that you're flying. Most people make something like this. Now you should hit every step that the manufacturer says that you should. Now sometimes people change things on aircraft, so people make their own checklist up, maybe to add something because a piece of equipment changed over the years or whatever the reason is. So people do sometimes modify a checklist, but your checklist should still follow the manufacturer's guidelines. So first flight of the day, entire pre flight, you take your checklist, you walk around and you hit every single thing that you need to hit on the aircraft. You do it. Okay. As a beginner, this might take you 45 minutes, it might take you an hour. As you get better with it and you get more experienced with it, that pre flight will get quicker and it doesn't mean you're not doing the pre flight, just means you get better with experience, you know what to look for. So that's the first part of the question, what's the next part? So let's see, as a student, do you pre flight, fly for 30 minutes, take a break and then do the next pre flight check before you continue? No, I'm not really sure. And maybe this was come up somewhere, maybe Ulrich heard this somewhere. Never heard of anybody taking a break for 30 minutes and then pre flighting again. I suppose you could if you were maybe just had some maintenance done and you were concerned about something, how it's going to be operating. I suppose you could probably do that if you needed to for some reason. But most generally you do your first pre flight of the day. You pre flight the whole entire aircraft. Okay. And let's say you go out and you fly for an hour, stop somewhere for lunch, take a break. I'm going to tell you what I do and I've talked about this in a video in the past and there was all kinds of remarks in the comments, good and bad about this. Okay, I'm going to tell you what I was taught by a Vietnam air pilot back when I was a new CFI guy that I learned a lot of really, really good stuff from early in my career as about a 300 hour CFI. This gentleman, I got the chance to fly with him for a couple days as he was, I was replacing him, he was retiring and I was taking over. So what he taught me was, you know, you do your first pre flight of the day and then let's say the scenario I just gave you, you stopped, you had lunch, you come back out. And what he taught me to do was check three things when you come back out to the aircraft. Check the fluid in the tail rotor gearbox, check the fluid in the main rotor gearbox and check your engine oil. And I've always stuck to that because I just, I like that, I think it's a great idea because you know those are your main components that you're worried about. So if you've had some fluid loss in that hour flight, hey, what's going on? There's fluid dripping out. What's going on? You should still do a walk around. Okay? So you go in the restaurant, you come out, you do some, let's say you call a fuel truck over, get some fuel. I recommend checking those three fluids and then you should still do a walk around, okay? Because maybe you forgot to Close this one or you were checking something back here. Maybe the baggage is open, maybe the fuel guy forgot the cap. So you do an entire walk around of the whole entire aircraft just looking at it, looking at, hey, is anything dripping out in the ground? Did anything change during flight? Is the aircraft sitting differently than when you walked away from it? You're looking for anything that may have changed while you were out flying. Doesn't take long to do a quick walk around. One other thing that I do on the subsequent flights as I'll open up the engine compartment, take a quick, quick, a quick peek in the engine compartment. That's what I do and that's what I've done for years. And I think that's a pretty good method. Not saying you got to do that. Depending on what company you're working for, what flight school you're at, they may have some specific method they want you to use. But I think as a safe and prudent pilot, you do a good pre flight start of the day using your checklist, then your subsequent flights at least check those three fluids, do a walk around, look for anything going on, look for anything leaking out in the ground. It doesn't take that long to do. And I've mentioned this before and I'll mention again, a mechanic that I worked around many years ago said you learn more from a post flight than you do a pre flight. I think there's a lot of truth to that. It's sitting in the hangar. Maybe you haven't flown for a week, you haven't been around that aircraft. You do a good pre flight and you go out and fly and then when you post flight something might start dripping, something might have come apart, something might have came loose, you might find a loose screw. Hard telling what you can find. So I think there's a lot to that post flight you can catch something that changed during the flight. So again, awesome questions. That's what I do. You know, you can put your comments down below on what you do. Then he asked, how do experienced pilot do this? Pilots do this like in crop dusting or helicopter tours. Alright, I'm not a crop duster and tours, I've flown of course. So let's say you're at a festival and you're flying all day long. Are you pre flighting every time you shut down and put a passenger in? No. Realistically, nobody's going to do that. You need a good pre flight, start of the day, you need a good weight and balance, you need to know your limits for the day, know all the performance and everything. But once you're flying rides, you're going to be up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down all day long. Need to come up with something decent. I don't know, you know, maybe each time you fuel, maybe check fluids real quick, take a peek in the engine compartment, you're flying all day. So again, I'm not going to dig real deep in that because that's going to depend on, you know, the company you're working for, the type of aircraft you're flying. And I know people would jump in and like to argue that one, but you know what, that's just safe and prudent pilot, right? If the aircraft, something goes wrong with the aircraft while you're flying, you could lose your life, right? So I don't think you can be too careful. How much skepticism is necessary towards the machine and where and where does it get dangerous? It gets dangerous if you're not pre flighting and it gets dangerous if you're ignoring something that comes up. Something changes on the aircraft, you're not sure about it, you keep flying. That's a problem. You know, you can always dial up your mechanic. Most mechanics are usually pretty accessible and it could be an oddball time of the day or night. If you don't know, don't do it. If you find something wrong with the aircraft and you can't get a hold of somebody, don't fly. You know, you, something changes, you're not sure about something, don't do it. And sometimes that's kind of sucky, right? You're stuck somewhere in the middle of nowhere and you got to stay in some fleabag motel. You got to do what it takes, right, to be safe. What is a good way to inch forward into experience without being overly cautious or becoming lightheaded. Thanks in advance. Keep up the good work. All the best. From Germany. Awesome. That's my best. Those are my best tips. You're going to learn as you're going through the training with your instructor. If you're going to a quality school and you got quality instructors, they're going to guide you along the process. I'm going to go back to in the beginning that pre flight takes a long time when you're just learning. As you continue to learn, you're going to get quicker. And here's one other little thing that I've heard over the years, and I believe this. They say it's a fact that the more or the longer that any one individual man or woman learns, learns in a Specific aircraft. And as they gain time in it, they start pre flighting less and less because they get familiar with the aircraft, it's always done a good job for them. It hardly ever breaks. So they say that in general, as a pilot gains more experience, more time in the aircraft, they'll pre flight less and less. And I'll be transparent and say, you know, sometimes you get a little lax like that, right? And then sometimes you got to kind of kick yourself in the ass and go, hey, just because the helicopter has been doing great and isn't braking on me, it's gonna break. It's a helicopter, it is gonna break. They all do. Sooner or later, something is gonna go wrong with that aircraft. There's not an aircraft on the planet that doesn't develop problems and issues. That's just the way it is. But through good pre flight techniques, good maintenance, the proper maintenance by qualified individuals, you can have an aircraft like this that runs and flies great. We almost never have a problem with it. The beauty of this one is we don't fly the hell out of it. You know, it flies, but we don't beat on it. And the same guy that's been maintaining it for many, many years is the main guy responsible for doing the maintenance. And he's about four and a half hours away. So if I need something when it's here, he will walk a local mechanic through, right? The owner's like, I don't want anybody but our guy working on it unless our guy approves it. And we've only done that once or twice where we had a local mechanic work on it. And they communicated with this, our main mechanic, to say, hey, this is how I want you to do that. So on and so forth. So, you know, here's a, here's a case where I fly a really good quality aircraft that I'm really proud to fly and really just always excited to fly it and feel good about it. And it doesn't really, you know, it has occasional little problem issue here or there. But when the, when any aircraft, not just this one specific, when they get the proper maintenance and you're pre flighting and you're taking care of them and you're flying them within limits, you're most likely going to never, ever, ever have a problem. I mean, to an extent. All right, I'm going to wrap it up. Day 187. Tomorrow will be day 188. Put your comments down below. Subscribe to the channel for us. 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