# 2 What are the requirements for landing a helicopter off airport?

Hey, it's Kenny with helicopter online ground school and I want to answer some questions about landing a helicopter off airport. I just did this video and uploaded it and it came out horrible. So I'm doing it again. I can delete the other one later. We have a subscriber yesterday who asked what are the requirements and restrictions for landing helicopter and I want to go through his questions here and go through the specifics of his question first. He said airports and non private helipads are obvious and I want to say that's wrong. Don't say obvious. We recently did an FAA webinar and we had an expert come in on heliports, did a whole webinar on it and the key thing that he mentioned over and over again was just because someone painted an H on it does not mean you can land there. It can be public and or private. Even if it's public any particular given day there could be, you know, shut down for whatever reasons. So you're going to always want to check anywhere you land permission on the person that owns it or the person has authority over it. So many times there might be an H painted somewhere. It does not mean you can land there. So you never want to assume that you can land there because it has an H marked on it. So in airports most generally you're not going to have a problem getting in any airport. There might be some restrictions for helicopters so you're always going to want to check as a good pre flight. That's what we do as pilots. You always have to check and learn everything about where you're going to land before you go there to land. But what about beaches, mountains, parking lots, parks, etc. Beaches, again, who owns it? Who's the authority over it? I'm sure there's some beaches you can land on. I'm sure there are some beaches that you cannot. So for each individual person or any individual place, you need to check with authority over that property and make sure it's going to be okay. Mountains first. Mountains. You know this, this person asked this question is I believe new to learning to fly, working on his license. I wouldn't recommend flying in the mountains until you've had some mountain training, number one. So then again, who owns the property? Who has authority over it? Checking with the authority first before you land there. Parking lots of parking lot. Again I would check with who owns it in an emergency, of course we can do anything we need to do to the extent to meet that. Emergency parking lots. I'm going to give you an Example, we landed in a parking lot once because of bad weather. We were in heavy snow. We needed a place to land. We need to get on the ground. And we picked a high school parking lot that had been plowed. Superintendent comes out, screams and yells at us. He's completely upset and mad that we landed in his lot. I tried explaining why we needed to land there. We didn't damage anything. We didn't hurt anything. He had an event scheduled later in the day. He called the local police. He called the faa. We stayed there waiting, of course, for the weather to clear. But the guy was really rude to us and just. He wouldn't listen to reason. In the end, did the FAA call me? No. Did I get in trouble? No. Law enforcement came out and the guy was, you know, reasonable. And he's like you. He looked at my license and, you know, he made some phone calls and he's like, hey, as far as I can tell, there's, you know, no law against him landing here. There was no restrictions. And again, we did it because of bad weather. We did it in the interest of safety. We needed a place to land, and we tried a local airport, and there was nobody there. And we continued on. And anyway, it was. It was all fine and dandy. Let me make light pad back up here so I can finish his questions. Parks after parking lot, he asked about parks. Again, who has authority over that park? A lot of national parks, of course, is going to be an absolute no. There are restrictions over wildlife areas and national parks. If you were going to try to land at any one of those, of course you'd have to have permission. So again, who has authority over the area is always going to be number one. Obviously, there can't be a threat to persons or property, which is true. Yes, but what other restrictions are there? And he asks, in the US and foreign countries. Okay, I'm speaking US I'm licensed in the US I can't speak on foreign countries. If you're going to fly to other countries, you're going to need to check their local ordinances and laws. Public and private lands, public. Just because it's public doesn't mean you can land there. There's sure tons of places we can land. But even if the area is public, I would still check with whoever owns that property or who is the authority over that property before landing there. Public and private lands. Private lands. So, no, if it's private, I wouldn't land there. If you got some valid reason for wanting to land there, contact the person that owns that property. I will shortly need to be flying in many countries where what are my flying restrictions and limitations? So let's boil it back to three things. Number one, is it legal? You're going to need to check with whatever authority is over the property. Are there any local ordinances or laws? Government, city, state, local. They're not real common most places you can land, but there are certain places that have those restrictions. So, you know, it's a pretty open question. You're going to have to check. It's always going to be better to be conservative and ask for permission anywhere that you're going to go and land again, unless it's an emergency. I want to give you an example. Well, I'm going to give you an example here in a second. But number one, is it legal if it is legal and you get permission to land there? Number two is what kind of obstacles are going to be in that spot that you're going to land? Number three, what's your aircraft performance going to be depending on any given day for any set of circumstances? Fuel load, wind temperature. There's a lot of things to consider when you're going to go somewhere and land off airport. I'm going to give you an example right here. This is my backyard. Haven't landed here yet. I intend to. I've already talked to one of the neighbors who works for the police department and he's like, oh cool. Hey, great. And I told him I'd let some of the other neighbors know what I was doing before I try to land here. But this is a nice big open area. I already know it, right, Because I'm living here. I've been looking at it, thinking about I'm gonna come by sometime, swing home, land yard to eat lunch. We have two normal, not normal, but two nice areas to come in and take off over. Depending on the wind over, there would be a channel going this way, the same way, have some power lines and then tenant the neighbors. But pretty well, pretty open. I'm here, I can visit it, I can see, I can plan everything. Prior to coming here to land again, I spoke with the neighbor, I should stop by the local government office, say, hey, I'm gonna be landing my helicopter in your yard. Just wanna make sure you don't have any local ordinances or anything like that. And it's of course good just to let people know because most people like helicopter helicopters landing, right? People think it's cool, got to be careful because everybody wants to run up to the helicopter. So that's another safety concern. But most People enjoy seeing helicopters land. Some people do not. Some people you will really aggravate and you will really get upset when you go landing somewhere off airport. So if you've checked with the property owner, you know you got permission to be there, you've visited it first, you've been there on the ground and you've checked for obstacles, you've checked for dangers, you know what the area looks like, and you've checked your aircraft performance for the day so that you can feel good about getting in and out with the amount of fuel and passengers that you have for the day. If anybody questions you later, you're gonna be just fine because you've done what you needed to do as a safe and prudent pilot. So that's a lot of questions there. And they're great questions. I don't mean it to be, you know, sound bad, but it's going to always boil down to doing what's safe and prudent and doing what is the right thing to do. And that way when you do go to land there, you can feel good about it, you can defend yourself in the event somebody's going to complain or somebody calls the police or somebody calls the landowner, hey, you've covered all your basis, you've done what you needed to do. That's kind of the quick. In general, we do talk about this in helicopter Land Ground School, but a lot of people that follow our YouTube don't necessarily. They're just interested learning about learning about helicopters, but they may never get their license. So I thought I'd put this out here today because I'm enjoying these weekend on the porch drinking coffee videos. So hey, all of our T shirts and stuff are now down below our videos on YouTube just in case you're interested. Helicopter Land Ground School we have private commercial CFI instrument courses, all available down below this video in the description box. You can click that link to go check it out. Please do us a favor like the video. Subscribe to our channel so you can check out some of our future videos we put out. We put out a lot of different stuff on specials for our ground school. General information about helicopters, answering questions for followers. So thanks for stopping by. Check out this video today. Please like and subscribe and we will see in the next video.