20 Years Working On HELICOPTER PRIVATE PILOT I R-44 Ferry Flight I

Hey, it's Kenny Keller and Gary Cleveland with HelicopterGround.com we want to cover some of the basics of the trip that we're getting ready to go on. I mentioned in a previous video we didn't give any of the really the details and I'll have Gary fill you in a minute. Gary has done all the prep work and the communication with this ground school member that's getting ready to travel here to fly with us. We're taking off Friday night to go down to Indianapolis. Indianapolis Friday night, get a good night rest, be at the aircraft Saturday morning, start the trip home. My daughter and a friend are going so we're gonna probably do it in two days, Saturday and Sunday. So we just wanna give you a little background just so people that are interested in the story of following of this Florida to Indiana cross country trip on Robinson Ari4R44 so I'll let Gary start with tell us just a little bit about the ground school member that's coming up here because we haven't even really talked about it because I've been off doing other stuff editing and you've been taking care of him. So just give us a quick rundown on his back and why he's traveling up here to fly with us.

Okay. And I just called Bill and said is it alright to say your name?

We're going to do a little bit.

Of a intro video getting his baby up here for wrapping up his private add on rating for helicopter and he said absolutely. He's been a member of helicopter online ground school and he's seen some of the success stories and he even mentioned the Jamie Cobb story with the orange helicopter out of Tex.

We'll put a link by this video, I'll put one up there and then one down in the box below too so you can check out the Jamie cobb story, similar R44 story. So I'll add that link to the video. I'm sorry, Go ahead Gary.

Well, here we got a guy, Bill Collier and he lives in Maryland. He purchased a Robinson R44 Raven 2 and it's currently sitting down in Sarasota. He started doing a little bit of flight training with a CFI down in Sarasota and things are getting busy down there and he's just ready to wr wrapped this thing up. He's been working on his helicopter rating now for over 20 years with a break in between. He owned an Enstrom at one time and was flying it was pic in that aircraft but never achieved the rating before it went away.

So a story that we get a lot. Eight years. Jack Day was just here eight years. Right. Jamie was four years. Going for the private. This gentleman's 20 years. We had a ground school member who got his rating after 27 years. He failed the rating 27 years ago, went in recently and passed. And he handed the pink slip to the examiner from 27 years ago. So proof that you could have a failure even from way back and you can still finish that rating. Plus the experience that you put towards a rating. It's been 20 years. With experience this guy has towards his rating still good 20 years later.

Absolutely.

Not a big deal. He's been digging out his log books and making sure he can verify that training that he had 20 years ago. So what a cool story that another person who has taken 20 years to go after rating. It happens to people. A lot of us take time to achieve our dreams sometimes. Like we'll mention, when Gary first asked me about going on this trip, I was kind of hesitant because I've done a lot of cross country trips and normally I don't want to be gone, especially on a weekend, but I thought, well, my daughter's old enough now, maybe she'd want to go. So I said, I told Gary, if I. If my daughter wants to go and if she wants to take a friend, fine. If she wants to go, then I'll look at going on the trip. And Gary says, well, just so you know, the tel number on this helicopter is 442. So I'm like, oh, you're kidding me. And he goes, well, that's kind of a sign that you better go. I have a 442 that I spent 27 years restoring. I've owned it longer than that. But from the day I tore apart till the day I started driving, it took me 24 hours, seven years to go from tearing it apart to back on the road again. So sometimes your dreams take a little bit of time. So that's cool. That the backstory on this gentleman coming up. Do you know much about the aircraft that we're bringing? It's fairly new, right? Do you know the year or anything about the aircraft other than it's got tail number 442?

I just know that recently they went to get it from the factory that CFI who was working with down there, and the owner flew it dual instruction cross country from the factory to Sarasota.

Awesome. So we're flying a new aircraft, which is nice. We're happy with that. Today we start talking about, you know, the weights for my daughter and her friend and our weights and start doing some weight and balance stuff, figuring the fuel so you know, these trips you could do last minute but it's kind of nice to start a couple days in advance, start figuring all this stuff where's our fuel stops going to be. We haven't sat down and done the actual really cross country planning yet. We had just a brief conversation and Gary suggested that we instead of going around some of the airspaces like we normally do, you know, we're helicopter pilots, we're guilty of going ah heck, instead of talking to that airspace, I'm just going to go around it. But Gary said why don't we fly through some of those so that we can record those for helicopter ground school. I said yes, absolutely, because we only have a couple videos. So more videos on more different, you know, airspace areas and airports and just to add some new content to the site is a really good idea. So that's the one plan.

Many times I'm doing these ferries by myself and you know, it can be laborsome to pull out a notepad and you know, write down the frequency they want you to turn to and the transponder code they want you to tune in and you know, blah blah, blah. With two of us there, you know, we'll be able to have little cockpit resource management going on and make it a little easier.

I've taken a helicopter from Indiana to Florida a couple times for an owner guide train with me but it was always last minute Dell deal, hey, can you leave tonight and can you be here by this time? And it was always push, push, push. And I've done those alone. And a long trip like that by yourself does kind of suck. I mean there's a lot of things to do going on and trying to take care of your navigation and your radios and do everything alone, you can do it. But having two pilots, one person flying, one person looking stuff up, changing frequencies, it is, it is a, it is a lot nicer with two people. So I'll be doing a lot of the camera work and Gary be flying and I'll be do some flying to make Gary run some camera but should be fun. So we're doing this for fun but also doing it for training value for content for helicopter ground school. The only other thing we've discussed so far is the mountains and I personally don't have a lot of mountain flying but when I spent some time down in Tennessee with Travis, experienced mountain flyer, it's on the COVID of my book, we went at length and talking about flying in and around the mountains. And his suggestion to me was, when you're going, you know, making a trip like that, he said, if you're going to go across the mountains, go to a thousand feet above the highest point or whatever, wherever you're crossing the mountain. If you go a thousand or above, that's going to help you avoid that turbulent turbulence from the winds and turbulence coming off the mountains. So other than that, that's all we've really discussed. I don't know if you've got anything else you want to add on any planning you've looked at so far, or are we just kind of.

We're starting to look at the flight plan to see where our fuel stops are going to be. And, you know, since we have your daughter and her friend, we'll definitely stop somewhere in North Georgia for the night. So we'll be investigating all that. We have a VFR sectional on the wall here.

We've been wanting to shoot a video with this background for a long time. So we thought, hey, this is a great time to go shoot this video and use the map on the wall for a little demonstration. So it's kind of cool to shoot a video in here for change.

So we'll be basically leaving out of Sarasota and we'll be flying past Tampa and on up through the. You'll see we're just kind of on the west edge of the Smoky Mountains there and right back to Charlie 6:5 home.

So I can see sitting from here, we're not going over the highest part. Right. The mountains aren't gonna be that tough for us to get over. Right. We're more to the east to be a little more altitude to gain to get over them.

You've got some higher peaks over here, so. Yeah, we've got some. Some hills and some foothills, I guess they call them, on the far west side there. It'd be a fun trip. Awesome.

We'll try to wrap this up. We have a member coming here tomorrow from Alaska, right?

Yes.

Is he flying in tonight?

He's flying in late tonight and he'll be here at 9am tomorrow. And what he's wanting to do is come here and finish up his helicopter.

CFI rating with us and what he's doing. And it was his request, he said, can I fly down for a couple days, fly with you guys, get a feel for the area and the aircraft, and then make a decision if I want to come back and finish. And we said, absolutely. So he's just coming for a couple days, go out and fly with us. Check out the, you know, the home. The home headquarters here, world headquarters for helicopter airline ground school of one of our many locations.

Yep, he's coming a long way to meet us and spend a couple of days flying and then hopefully towards the end of May, he'll come and spend a week or two and wrap up that rating.

Awesome. So we will try to do a video tomorrow, maybe on some of the navigation, some more in depth. I know you're going to be busy with him most of the day, but we're going to try to do a quick video each day just to kind of document the trip. I don't know how much I'll be able to edit at night and be able to do every day, but at least we might probably do some live events, get a lot of footage on the way and be able to kind of put something together when we get back home and pull out the content for training and pull up the content just for fun and should be a good deal. Anything else you want to add before we roll out? I know it's time for you to get going, head home. Nope. Do us a favor, subscribe to the channel and click that little bell. That way you can be notified each day as we progress with our trip, Florida to Indiana. And also you'll get new updates on helicopter land ground school. Down below in the box there is a link for a free PDF copy of my checkride book. Helicopter Checkride. Free PDF copy you can grab. Amazon number one bestseller. And then Gary authored this with me. We did this together and we hit Amazon number one best seller on remote pilot 107 online. Free to be. We have a free link for that too, right? Yes, we'll make sure that's down below too. So subscribe the channel, click the bell comment and like. If you don't like the video, click the like button twice. Leave your comments down below. Let us know what you want to see along the trip and we shall see you next video. That little thing goes red right there. And we are recording. Oh, here you go, Gary. We were gonna write this out for you. Florida trip, scene one.

Action. Yeah, I'm.

Put mine on silent too, because I'm gonna have to. And we can order that live, so.

Yeah.

Oh, sorry. Oh my God, don't make me laugh.

Do the intro.

Therehere we go. One, two, three.