#239 Pinnacle Approach and Landing Coffee With Kenny
22 Nov 2025 · 4 min
Kenny Keller and Taz demonstrate a pinnacle approach and landing in the Nevada desert. They show how to assess wind from the north-northeast, approach from the south-southwest, and manage performance figures like climbing out-of-ground-effect to 4,000 feet from a 500-foot hover above terrain at 3,200 feet elevation.
Questions this episode answers
July 20, 2020.
In 2018 after Heli Expo.
About 500 ft above the elevation of the train.
About 3,200 ft.
Up to 4,000 ft.
Chapters
Helicopterground.com Day 239 Coffee with Kenny. Had to walk off camera just for a second to grab my coffee. Memorial Day weekend is over. I'm sorry, Labor Day weekend is over. I always get those two mixed up. And today during coffee with Kenny, I'm gonna roll a video for you. This is from when Taz and I went out in the desert in Las Vegas and did some maneuvers and we had an absolute blast. This was 2018 after Heli Expo. I hung around in Vegas for a few days and went out with Taz and did some flying in the desert and check out this Pinnacle. This thing is just really, really neat. So we decided, you know what, let's film that. And this is a video that we do have inside helicopter land ground school. And I just wanted to share it with you today because it's a really neat video and I was pretty proud of my camera work and we had just such a freaking blast. And I want to let you know, I just talked to Taz last week. Brian was out there in Vegas with Taz and we were. I was kind of jealous that they were out there having a good time and. And I said he's like, hey, you got to get back out here. And I'm like, you know what, I got some fresh video I want to make inside hogs. You want to help me? And he's like, yeah, let's do it. So we're making plan now to go out for me to go out to Vegas and meet Taz and we're going to shoot some fresh video for helicopter online ground school in and around the helicopter. And we've used Robinsons and Switzer's. I'm see, I'm sorry. Robinsons and instruments and some Jet Ranger stuff. Never really had a Schweitzer available to do any of the ground school videos. And we have a lot of Switzer fans out there. Right. I am going to take off in a couple weeks. We're going to make the dates. I'm going to go out to Vegas and Taz and I are going to put together some new videos for you for inside helicopter only Ground school. So I'm going to go ahead and roll this for you and let you check out this video and I'll be right. Alright.
So picking up from Pinnacle, obviously we've got brush and rocks and stuff like that. So we're gonna have a nice gentle pickup just to make sure that we're not getting anything caught on the skids. Roll the throttle up here a little bit. And now we're just gonna slowly start lifting it up. So she gets light on the skids. There she goes. And nice. Pretty good. Now we know where the winds are at. We got good power. Lower the nose here and we'll start a little bit forward and off we go. All right, so what we're going to do now is we're going to come in and we're going to do a high reconnaissance. So about 500ft above the elevation of the train. The train's about 3200ft. So we're going to be about just a little bit higher here. And since I'm sitting on the left hand side of the aircraft, we're going to make the turn around to the left. So we're looking for our standard.
So.
We'Re looking for the winds. So we've got to know where the winds are coming from. So we're basically coming out of the north northeast. The sun is directly above us so that's not a big factor. And we got some cloud cover today. So it's actually no sun glare. So now what I'm looking for is a path in and a path out. So I know I'm going to come in from the south southwest here and have a nice little run in. There's a little bit of a, there's a tree at the end of the little football shape type thing. So I'm going to come in just to the left of that and that way I'm not going to hit that. And then my spot is going to be right in the middle. I know from checking the power setting before I left that I should have an out of ground effect cover all the way up to 4,000ft. So that's going to be plenty of altitude for based on where we're at. Alright. So I'm going to extend my downwind here a little bit. Now I'm going to start my turn back in. So I extended it out so I got my final. I'm gonna come in just a little bit higher than normal due to the winds. I don't want to get the burble off of the, the leeward side of the mountain. So I'm gonna come in just a little bit higher. I'm looking at, there's about 45 knots looking pretty good. I'm gonna keep it right there. So getting a little bit of power about right here. So it's keeping it right there. Etl I got a little bit of a bush that I'm gonna fly right over the top of. And landing right on the other side of this little bush, making sure my tail does not hit it. There we go. And nice gentle set down. As I'm setting down here just to make sure it looks like it's nice and hard and rocky. But I'm gonna make sure that as that skid touch that I'm not sinking in, that I'm not going to get snagged on anything. Alright, so there we go right there. And I'm just kind of light on the skids, making sure that it's nice and firm before I lower the collective. There we go. And that would be your pinnacle approach and landing.
Sam. So I really, really like this video again, that pinnacle was so cool. And here kind of gives you an idea. In the video you can see kind of what an approach looks like coming to a pinnacle. And this is about to where we go to switch cameras. I'm kind of hiding down there on the other end and I pop up and shoot Tazzy's coming in and you can see kind of what, you know, a nice slow approach looks like. So thanks for tuning in. Day 239 Coffee with Kenny. Make sure you like and subscribe to the channel. We do a daily video every single day talking about training, checkrides, problems, successes, all kinds of stuff. So make sure you subscribe, click the bell. When you do, leave us comment down below, give us a thumbs up. And if you want to be a punk, go ahead and go thumbs down if you'd like. But when you do that, go ahead and make sure you hit thumbs down twice. So thanks for tuning in. Like subscribe, click that little bell and we'll see in day 240. Peace out. Hell yeah.
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