#257 - CRAZY Helicopter Landing - Coffee With Kenny
22 Nov 2025 · 5 min
Kenny Keller watches a user-submitted helicopter landing and explains why it looks wild but is actually pretty normal. The pilot made common mistakes: trying to descend straight down and getting shaky. Kenny recommends hovering first, then moving forward and down, or using a hovering square pattern, a technique from Vietnam-era pilots.
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Day 257. Coffee with Kenny. Got the Schweitzer cup today for coffee. Honor of dan Taz Christman, 2018 Flight Instructor of the year. He's got some new production equipment coming in today in Vegas waiting for him to send us a picture. Anyway, I'm Kenny Keller, creator of Helicopter Online ground school. And I want to talk about crazy crzy cray cray crazy helicopter dolly landing attempt. Does he make it? Oh, bad. Sounds like it's going to crash. I'm just making fun because I'm thinking this guy wants to try to get some views on this video. Anyway, we're going to watch it. It's a dolly landing. I'm going to critique it. In all reality, it's not that crazy. The title says crazy crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy. It's not that crazy. This is what you see a lot out there when people go to land on dollies. Luckily, I was taught by a Vietnam era pilot a trick on dolly landings that's been working for me for many years. All in all, it seems crazy, but it's not that bad. So let's go take a look at it. And starting off pretty smooth. Coming into the dolly right there. I think he should have came to a hover and then just started working it down. But this is typical. Somebody comes up and they're looking, they're looking good like he is until they try to go straight down. Look at that. He's almost there. He starts wobbling around. Now remember, things usually look worse on the outside than do the inside. He was right there. He was at that air cushion. He had it. But you know, he's just getting nervous and that's why we call it the dolly monster. Now, what he does next, I really like. See what he's doing. He got nervous. He was getting all wobbly. He's going to take a little break. He's going to go around, do a hovering square pattern and come back. And that's what this Vietnam era pilot taught me many years ago. And I like that a lot. So again, I don't know that pilot. I don't know the helicopter. I don't know the guy that made this video. And it doesn't matter because it's really a good critique and it's a good video because this is what it looks like in the real world when people a lot of the time are trying to land on dollies. Again, he's coming in nice and slow. That looks good. If he'd paused there for a second and then just start working it down to the dolly. It would have been better, but let's see what happens. It's crazy. Crazy Crazy is the title. Oh, my God, there he goes. Oh, my God. Where's he going? What's going to happen? Is he going to crash? The video says crazy, crazy. Will he make it? I don't know. And boom, he's down. That is actually a pretty typical helicopter dolly landing, in my opinion. There's really nothing wrong with that. Actually, he got a little wobbly when he came in. That's it. So it's not so crazy. That's more of like real world helicopter dolly landings. And I've watched it happen over and over the years. The problem usually is when a person tries to go straight down like this. If he'd come in, just a little bit of forward movement and down something like this, it'd work out a lot better for him. And I've done that video three or four times in the past. We have it in ground school. We have it here, several of them here on YouTube. In one of the Coffee with Kenny videos, I'm sure I know I covered dolly landings and we did it with just theory and talking like this. But I've got other videos out there actually in the helicopter. So dolly landings, that's very typical. Not that crazy. Still a good video. I'm glad somebody sent that to me. I'll put the link down below in the event you want to check it out yourself. And the creator of the video will get credit because it'll be down below in my description box. So I didn't steal his video. I just played it and use it as a little teaching experience. Subscribe to the channel and click the bell for our daily video. I'm going to start doing a little more stuff like this. We're going to start critiquing some accidents and also other. Some of these other crazy, crazy, crazy helicopters videos we see. Right. So it's Sunday, I'm sorry, Saturday, my favorite day of the week. I just came in here to do the video instead of doing it home because checking out the new studio functionality here. Making a lot of progress. Taz is going to start this next week. Our new weather section. We've got our fiber Internet coming, so we can do start doing some live trainings and so much cool stuff going on at helicopter land ground school going into year number eight this spring, we'll have a big celebration. All right, I'm gonna get out of here. Comment below about dolly landings. What you've seen, what you work, what works for you? What doesn't work for you? What you think of the video? Subscribe the channel, click the little bell. When you do, leave us a comment down below and we'll see you in. Day 258 Coffee with Kenny. Peace out. See you tomorrow.
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