#229 Social Media Helicopter Maneuvers, don't confuse skill vs showing off

Day 229 coffee with Kenny. I want to talk about social media takeoffs. In the past I've done a video about television and movie takeoffs, which a lot of us grew up on. But now, what the world has changed. A lot of you are getting into this and you're watching all this cool, crazy helicopter stuff on social media, Facebook, YouTube and wherever else. And something that all these people know, our new HOGS wall of fame. These are all people that have completed our training and have got their rating and they've heard me preach about hover pre takeoff checks, the proper way to take off, all these types of situations. So after our conversations with Dave Faulkner yesterday, who was here and did a video with us, I'll put that link up above, we talked about a whole bunch of stuff and Dave and I spent the day together and he's going for his CFI, 20 year experience, pilot, flew law enforcement. And we talked about a number of things. And the one thing we talked about was how on social media you're seeing a lot of crazy stuff going on and you're seeing these fancy helicopters looping and rolling and doing all kinds of stuff and these fancy takeoffs, well, guess what? A lot of what you're seeing, if you're new to this, you'll know this if you're an experienced pilot. But if you're new to the helicopter thing, do not get yourself. If you want to like those videos, that's great. But just understand that's not what we do in a helicopter and that's not what's safe. Every single thing that we do in a helicopter starts with a hover, it ends with a hover. We take off like this when we can build our altitude and airspeed. When you have to clear obstacles, yes, you will do max takeoff depending on obstacles performance, the aircraft, it may be straight up, it may be something like this, it may be something like this. Several different methods, depending on who you are, where you're flying conditions and aircraft. But when you see people taking off from the ground and you see away they go, that is not a proper helicopter takeoff. There's no reason to ever go, yank it completely off the ground and do this backwards and start turning around, or lots of the other crazy stuff that you see going on out there. And I've been seeing a lot of, oh, this guy is helicopter pilot of the year. Check out this guy, he's the helicopter pilot of the year. No, the guys that are helicopter pilot of the year are like Dan Taz Chrisman, who got 2018 flight instructor of the year. You wouldn't see Dan Taz Chrisman ever going out in a helicopter and doing stuff like that. You never catch me doing stuff like that. So keep in mind that a helicopter, the way it's designed, is designed to take off nice and slow, build altitude and airspeed and go. And these hover pre takeoff checks again, if you're new to this, you may not know this. If you've been part of our ground school, you know this. Everything should start and end with a hover pre takeoff check. The reason you do that is because when you pick that helicopter up, you're putting a load on all the components, the engine, the main road transmission, gearbox. You lift it up to see how the helicopter is going to act. You don't know when it's on the ground and there's no load on it. You won't know until you pick it up and whether you give it 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 20 seconds, you pick it up to check systems. How's it running? Is there any kind of a miss going on? How much power are you pulling? When you see people yanking off the ground and just going without a hover pre takeoff check. That's never right. It's never right. We've been talking a lot about EMS flying yesterday. Or we did it. We talk about it often in these videos. But also Dave and I were talking about this a lot because he's looking at maybe going to an EMS career after his law enforcement flying, which is awesome. And I was telling Dave how at particular EMS base I worked at, you know, we're all trained by the company, right? And the company says hover pre takeoff check every time. Right. More advanced aircraft, twin engines, you have a lot of systems to be testing. You lift to a hover regardless of whether you're doing training, ferry flight or even if you're going on an EMS medical mission, the emergency is for the medical crew, what they're doing. As a pilot, you're getting safely from point A to point B. So yanking it off the ground and going is not the answer. And I have to say, trained by the company. Cool. Everybody has to do a hover pre takeoff check. Cool. I did that all fine and dandy. So I get flying ems and one day the pilot that I worked opposite of said, Kenny, the medical crew has a problem because you hover every time before you take off. I'm like, yeah. And he's like, well, you know, they're just kind of wondering. And I'm like, I'm not gonna say his name. But I'm like, you went to the same training that I did, Navy pilot. And the company wants us to do a hover pre takeoff check every single time. Did you read the company email where the chief pilot put out an email to every pilot and said, we're hearing there's a lot of you that are not doing hover pre takeoff checks. You will do them every single time. And if we observe you or one of our, you know, check airmen observe you doing a hover or doing a takeoff without a hover pre takeoff check, you won't work for us anymore. Even with that mass email, the three pilots that I worked opposite of didn't do it. Why didn't they do it? Because they were all about getting off the ground, going, well, it's not how the company wanted it done. It's not safe. You always want to lift the aircraft up, do a hover pre takeoff check, check the systems, make sure you're good to go. And then when it's time to go, you're going to use whatever kind of takeoff is necessary to safely get the aircraft moving. If you're at an airport, you're just going to use the taxiway, the Runway, you're going to build some speed and you're going to fly away. If you have obstacles, trees at a scene, a hospital in front of you, sure. Then you're going to be doing different variations of max takeoffs to get whatever it is you need to get out of there. So I just want to put that message out there today after this. Yesterday was an awesome day with Dave, and Dave was here, signed his picture up on the hog's wall, had a great day. And this is one of the things we discussed. And I was just, you know, telling him, as a cfi, this is something that you have to teach. Right. And he already knows that. But it's just was a great discussion. I thought, you know, that's the video I wanted to do today. So fancy flying videos are great, and the Red Bull helicopter looping and doing all that kind of stuff is great. But Heather just asked me before the video, she was like, well, can helicopters fly upside down or can they do those? And I'm like, that's, that's the thing. Heather specifically trained pilots in aircraft specifically built for doing loops and rolls. Yes, it can be done. If you go back and check, like some of the articles from Chuck Aaron, who was the original guy that really started doing all those loops and really fancy aerobatics. It's kind of impressive because he talks about how he didn't just go out and start looping a helicopter. When he was first asked if it could be done, he said no. And they asked him, you know, several times, and he put thought into it. And then once he started working with that, he built a helicopter specifically to go out and loop and do aerobatics. And they did a lot of work and a lot of different things to the aircraft. And he even talks about how. And I don't remember whether it was 50 times or 100 times, but he said he kept going out and practicing, and he would chicken out, and he would chicken out, and he would chicken out, and each time, he just kept taking it a little bit farther and a little bit farther. So when you see these crazy things going on in a helicopter, know that if you're specifically trained for aerobatics and you're in an aircraft that can do aerobatics, great. But for the newbies, these crazy takeoffs. You see, I just saw another one the other day, some guy taking off, just some kind of for fun flight. And I said, here's his takeoff, and away he goes. And I'm watching this going. There was no obstacles in front of him whatsoever. And everybody's on YouTube or Facebook or wherever it was. Oh, that's so cool. You're so cool, man. You're a great pilot. And he needed to take off like that. Why have no idea? Just to show off, right? So keep in mind, as you're getting into helicopter flying, the fancy shit you see going on in helicopters on tv, movies, social media, ain't necessarily the way that you need to be doing it. So there you go. Day 229. Coffee with Kenny. Come back tomorrow for day 2:30. Heather's kicking ass on the wall. She's got this section almost done. Next week, you'll see this one fill up over here. And then we got two more panels to get ready to go and continue on with the Hogs Wall. So if you don't know what the Hogs Wall is, it's called the Hogs Wall of Fame. And we looked this up. We started this a little over a year ago, and we did this. Started it in our previous hanger. And we just started. I started it, actually. I got antsy. I was gonna let Heather do it, and I got antsy one night and just started doing it, but I just started slapping them up on the wall, you know, and going crazy with it. And it was a great start. But when we decided to move, we thought, you know what? We hate to tear down the wall. And we didn't want to, you know, destroy the pictures that we had. But then we thought about it, we thought, you know, we can reprint them on a better glossy paper. So we decided just to start from scratch here at the new HOGS hangar. This is Heather's job. It's her baby. She'd been working on it. And we decided to do it this way so that our members, when they stopped to see us, just like Dave Faulkner was here, we can pop it down, pull it out, have you sign it while you're here. For those members that had signed before, please come back and we'll resign them again. We've got Caleb, who's just working on his CF by now, just started communicating with me. We have three pictures of Caleb already, I think private, commercial and instrument now working on a cfi. So pretty soon, well, yeah, here he is. Private pilot, commercial pilot, instrument pilot. Caleb signed those before, but he's planning on coming down to take me a ride up into what he calls the flying banana. It's a yellow airplane seaplane. So when Caleb comes down, hopefully we'll have his CFI picture because he gets this check right out of the way and we'll have Caleb re sign and Hank, we can just take one and move it and then we'll have all four pictures of Caleb. That's how helicopter land ground school works. We help you get through all the ratings. Private, commercial, CFI, instrument. We have a 24 hour test flight on any of those courses for the monthly memberships or the yearly memberships. You can try the training for 24 hours, no charge. If it's right for you, you just let the system start to bill you monthly, yearly. If it's not right for you, you remove your credit card from PayPal. I'm sorry, end it in PayPal or remove your credit card from settings within the HOG site. And we part as friends. And so many people like Caleb come in, do their private for a month or two or three months, however long it takes. They take a break, come back, they do the instrument. That's the beauty of the monthly membership. And we just started this a couple years ago, so you don't have to make a large purchase up front. You can just go monthly, use the training as long as you need it. Cancel anytime, come back anytime. So put the link down below for helicopterground.com, go down there to check it out. We do have a 30 day money back guarantee on any course. So do us a favor, subscribe to the channel. You subscribe, click that little bell to be notified of our daily coffee drinking helicopter training videos. Give us a thumbs up and we'll see you in day 230. Peace out.