#221 Foreign Students need a Part 141 school for Flight Training
22 Nov 2025 · 5 min
Kenny Keller explains that foreign students need a Part 141 flight school to get a US helicopter private pilot rating, since his Part 61 school can't sponsor visas. A student named Johan completed his private training in three weeks after heavy pre-study using Kenny's online ground school.
Questions this episode answers
221
July 4, 2020
Thomas Rowley Rojas
Part 141
About three weeks
Chapters
Day 221 copy with Kenny. I'm Kenny Keller, the creator, Helicopter Lane ground school and a couple things today. First we gotta congratulate one of our helicopter line ground school members, Thomas Rowley Rojas. Kenny, thanks to your great videos and encouragement on top of a couple of great local CFIs. I passed my rotary checkride yesterday. One photo is with the examiner. He is also the chief examiner of the Panama Aviation Authority. The other is a shot taken by my CFI a few weeks ago while we were practicing confined area landings. The patch of land is a dry spot in the middle of Lake Gatun. Tom Rowley. Awesome. He also said PS hope you're enjoying your California trip. So yep, just catching up. Emails. Only been back a few days. Congratulations Thomas. This is freaking awesome. Thank you for the pictures. Pictures are going up tomorrow. We mapped it out today how we're going to do it. Heather's going to start putting them up so been promising to rebuild the Hogs Wall for quite some time. It's rebuilding tomorrow. We have so many great member stories and they send in their pictures just like Thomas after they pass in their checkride and we love sharing those and we're ready to get the pictures back up and share the Hogs Wall. And I have a question here and this is a very common question and I wanted to do this in a video today. This is for foreigners, foreign citizens that are not citizens of the United States. And we're getting more and more of these types of questions. So it's a great question and a great topic for a video. And I want to help you out a little bit about what you need to do. I want to get my helicopter private pilot rating in the us There are a couple things I'm concerned about. Paperwork. Do I need a visa and what else do I need? You need to Contact a part 141 flight school. A part 141 flight school is going to be able to help you with all the documentation and all the things that you need to train in the United States. We operate as a part 61 school so we're not authorized to help foreign citizens. And I wish we could. I would love to say that we could help you, but we can't. That's due to the regulations. So for those of you that are watching our videos and interested in online ground school to actually come over here, do the flight training, you need to contact a part 141 flight school and they can help you make the arrangements to come over to train. But then on to the question. So I can do your online ground school here and then fly over to the US to do my flight time, written test, medical test and checkride. Yes, you can. And whether you're going to a Part 61 or Part 141 school when you come over here. Well, if you're coming over, have to be part 141 when you get ready to come over. You can use our ground school to help yourself prepare. And I'm going to share a link below and up here on the top of the page for Johan. Johan came over from another country and he drove up and down the field in the tractor watching our videos. And you think that might sound silly, but that's what he did. He had an iPad and the tractor. So during his 10 months of his work year, as he's driving, he's watching, listening to videos, learning the information, comes over to the US to train and does his reading in three weeks because he had the ground knowledge and Johan is for real. Again, I'll put the link up there and a link down below. I highly encourage you to watch this video because the other part of his question says, assuming all done with all the theory, by the time I get there, how fast can I do everything else? For the private pilot, he did it in three weeks because he applied himself and he studied really hard before coming over here. Honestly, his instructor is the one that emailed me and said, kenny, your ground school student Johan showed up here and another instructor checked him out and told me his ground was done. And I thought, oh, baloney, that can't be. He goes, I checked him out myself. And the other instructor was correct. He had studied so hard, he said all we had to do is fly because he had all the knowledge. Within a few days he took the written test, aced it, and then all they had to do was just fly, fly, fly for three weeks. And three weeks later, from off the street to private pilot, Johan was done. It can be done. So I appreciate this gentleman's questions. Yes, you can use our ground school before coming over here, the helicopter land ground school, you can use it to help yourself prepare the information. Even if you have to still go through someone else's ground school program, you can use ours to prepare yourself. And we have members that do that. And they say, I get a full, you know, I have full fledged ground school at my school and I like the training and I have no problem with my flight school or my instructors. They're great. I wanted something to supplement that when I'm at home, so you can do that as well. So our ground school can be used either way. You can use it just as a supplement, and you can use it as your main resource, depending on where it is you're going to be flying. So I appreciate this gentleman's questions. Congratulations again, Thomas. Awesome. Day 221. 221. Please subscribe. When you do, click that little bell. That little bell. So you notified the daily video and you can go down below to the link helicopterground.com to go check out our ground school. We have private, commercial, CFI and instrument, all those courses available below. So go down there, click that link, check them out, and we'll see you in day two. 22.
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