Kenny Keller describes how a heavily-used personal study notebook — created after failing a private pilot checkride — was consolidated, transcribed by his sister, and used as the basis for an online Helicopter Ground School (PowerPoint + video). He notes the notebook’s physical age and condition, that ~150 slides have been produced so far, and that the materials (hardback notebook, ebook, and online modules) are geared toward checkride preparation and core helicopter topics (symmetry of lift, flapping, coning, stored energy, airspace, thunderstorms, spatial disorientation) with phoneetic alphabet and airframe-specific notes (Robinson, Enstrom, Schweizer). The training is intended as focused checkride prep rather than a from-zero private pilot course.
Chapters
So here is the infamous notebook. This, as you can see, back cover is gone. Little bit wore. I've used this thing maybe a couple times. And what I did with this notebook basically is I failed my first private pilot checkride. Like, I have people, a lot of you guys know that I talk about it a lot. And that meant a lot because it was a struggle. It was upsetting to go home with my tail between my legs after all that time and effort to fail. It was pretty. It was pretty tough. So I went home and I didn't go back for six months. And when I decided to go back and hit it again, I knew that I hadn't studied enough the first time around. And I had all these multiple notebooks different. I had notes on this pad, notes on this pad. I had paper shoved in this book. And I was overwhelmed by the amount of different things that there was to sit and study. And I thought, you know what? I need a decent notebook. I need to put everything in one place where I can study. And I didn't want to have to look through 10 different books. I mean, it's important. You still have to have your reference materials. But I wanted one good place to study. So I can remember going and buying this. And I've been trying to figure out what the date says, but I can't tell the date. But I paid $3.99 for it. But I know it was well over 10 years ago. And then basically I put together my own little study guide. So my sister gets credit for going through this thing and transcribing all this for me. These are some of her notes and so on for different slides. Because this notebook we have based the PowerPoint presentation we have. We have around 150 slides done so far, and we're not done yet. But that's going to be our online ground training on the paid site that you'll be able to go through. And I'll have video along with that to talk you through the different things in the notebook. But these are some of the things that. Different things on our slides. And the first couple pages are over here because I've used this so much, it's wore out that we've got the first couple pages hidden back there away. But it's all good stuff. And there's a lot of Robinson stuff in here because I changed originally with the Robinson. But that's fine. Some things will in between the different helicopters are the same, some are different, but I'll point them out. What's Robinson? What's enstrom Maybe some Schweitzer stuff, but it's pretty much all the meat of everything you've got to know the symmetry of lift, flapping, stored energy, coning, phonetic Alphabet, a little bit of everything, air spaces, flight service, just all the meat of what you got to know. Three stages of a thunderstorm. And they're all my own drawings. And basically what we've done is my sister has went through, transcribed it all over to the computer and she's put in some images, but we haven't changed a whole lot. We've tried to keep everything pretty much true to the notebook as the form that I made it well over 10 years ago. And over the years, people have wanted to buy it, borrow it, steal it, and I've always hid it away and never let anybody have it. So that's why we decided to base our training basically all in notebooks. So the notebook is going to be available in hardback, it'll be available in ebook. And again, the PowerPoint that we're doing, all the online stuff is all going to be based on the notebook. So it's not taking necessarily you from private pilot day one student off the street. It's kind of geared towards, really geared towards checkride preparation, going through and helping you make sure that you know the stuff you got to know, spatial disorientation, so on and so forth. So there's a little, little insight to the notebook and the online ground training. So.
