#278 Private Pilot Ground Questions - where to start?!
22 Nov 2025 · 9 min
Kenny Keller answers questions about starting helicopter ground school. The private pilot course is the best entry point, costs vary by subscription, and flight training takes about 18 hours. Online ground school may or may not count toward in-person requirements depending on your school's rules.
Questions this episode answers
$49 per month.
24 hours (no billing if cancelled within 24 hours).
About 18 hours of training.
He refers to it as day 288.
Chapters
Day 278 coffee with Kenny. Favorite day of the week. I gotta set that down. Grab the iPad. I'm gonna catch up a couple of questions that have just recently come in. This is a good day to catch them up home on a Saturday. First one is Brenda. She said, good morning, Kenny. My name is Brenda and I'm looking to enroll in your online program. I'm currently in the service trying to switch branches to the army to fly helicopters. Awesome. I have flight experience with fixed wing but no rotary. And I was wondering which course do you think I should enroll to? Help me. Hands down, private pilot is the cheapest and easiest and would be my first focus for you. We have a monthly option, it's only 49 bucks a month that you can keep as long as you like and cancel anytime. That would be your best step, your best start. Now if you want to spend more money, you can go with a yearly option or you could go with a big professional pilot package that we have, but that's considerably more money. I would start with the private and just go and check it out. And you can check it out for 24 hours and not even be billed with our test flight. So that's where I would start. It's easy for people to get overwhelmed going towards your aviation career and there's a lot to look at and a lot to think about. But I think for people it's. It's best if you just focus on that private first, focus on getting that thing done. It's easier than worrying about everything else and anything you get. I would think in your position, any rotary wing knowledge that you can get the better and any flying you can do the better with the course that you're taking. Would you recommend what would you recommend is best for my career choice, I'd start with the private pilot, start working on the knowledge and start doing some flying if that's feasibly possible for you, where you get some training in the civilian world, start getting some time under your belt. Hands down. I think that's where you should start. Next question from Jaeger. And Jaeger says, hey, my name is or hello, my name is Jaeger and I'm recently seen you on YouTube and the approximate cost of a private pilot certificate. Awesome. Liked and subscribed by the way. Awesome. Thank you. But I have some questions. How long approximately does the private pilot school take? We answer this question often. It all depends on you and how much time that you have available for the ground school. You could do it in a fairly short time span. Or it could drag out. It depends on how much time do you have to devote to it each week, each month. The more time you put through it, the more quicker you could get through it. The less time you have per day or per week, the longer it's going to take. The private pilot, which is what you're asking about, is about 18 hours of training. How fast can you grasp that training? You know, everybody learns in a different way, Everybody, everybody retains information different way. So it really does depend. But it's 18 hours of training for the private pilot and you can go through it at your own pace. In the videos we try to keep them five to 15 minutes so you can get little bite sized pieces at a time. You can go through the whole course step by step. It has a resume feature, it keeps track of what information you've watched, what you haven't. You can uncheck them after they're completed to know you want to go back and check them again. I see the price, $49 monthly, so I'm just trying to get a possible rough average at the cost of completion. Beauty is you can go a month at a time. You can use it for just one month. If that's all you want, you can keep it for as many months as you want. You can unsubscribe, take a break and always come back. So it's really up to you on the time and effort and how much you're going to spend. Does completing the online ground school count towards actual ground school time? Another question. That depends. If you're going to attend a 61 school, everything you're doing is going to basically count because you're basically self study or one on one with your instructor. If you're going to a part 141 school, they're going to require you to still go through their ground school sessions, their required training, because that's what they have to do. They have no choice. Our online ground school can still help you. Even if you're going to part 141, we have many members that use it just as a secondary knowledge to the main knowledge they're getting from their flight school. So when I'm ready to find a helicopter flight school near me, may I bring all the completed forums and certificates of completion in there and just start flying? So it again depends on the school, part 61 or part 91. Regardless of forms and certifications, you got to have the knowledge and if you got the knowledge, you've got it. And at a part 61 school, if you can prove to the instructors that you have the knowledge they won't have. They'll have a minimum amount of time they'll have to do with you to verify that knowledge. Instructor Whether you use an online home study course or you do one on one instructor, any individual instructor that's going to sign you off to take the test has to verify your knowledge. That may only be a few hours of ground school. It may be more depending on where your knowledge is at at. That instructor has to work with you and make sure that you have all the knowledge that you need. I thank you so much for the time to reading this and I'm eager to hear from you. Sincerely, from a future student awesome. We hope to see you on the inside of Helicopter Land Ground School again. There's a 24 hour test flight and that's the beauty of this. You can check out the private pilot membership and it costs you Nothing for the first 24 hours. Yes, you have to sign up with your credit card, but you have a full 24 hours and I've tested this. You will not be billed. If you decide the training is not right for you right now, you remove your credit card from the settings inside the HOGS site, lower left hand corner or if you sign up with PayPal you go into PayPal and the subscription there and you'll be billed nothing. You can come back anytime or you can decide to be billed for the first month and you can then unsubscribe anytime during that 30 day period and we have a no hassle money back guarantee on top of the test flight. So you can't lose. The burden is on us to provide the value to you and make sure some training that's going to work for you and going to be compatible with your study and what you got going on. So will mention that we're getting ready to start a big Halloween sale coming up. Now we won't do the Halloween sale on the monthly because it's already darn cheap anyway, but we're going to run big specials on the yearly and professional pilot and last year Halloween was our not only did we have the most fun at Helicopterland Ground School that we've ever freaking had, it was our biggest month ever and people really enjoyed the sale. So we'll go back and look and see what we did last year. I know it was a huge discount and see if we can possibly beat that discount. I don't know. I know it was pretty darn huge so subscribe the channel. This is day 288. I did it in the garage today to cut the wind. I was gonna do it in the back porch, but it's just too dang windy today. All started 200, 288 days ago. I just did a random video, One more or one afternoon drinking a cup of coffee. And very quickly, people started saying, well, you're gonna do it tomorrow. And then within the first week, our hogs members started calling that coffee with Kenny, named by our members. That's where the name comes from. The other day, some guy said, yeah, I like your coffee gimmick. Not really a gimmick. It was me on the porch drinking a coffee and start talking about helicopter training questions. And that's what a lot of this has been for the last 288 days, is answering your questions of your questions. And we answer questions whether you're a ground school member or not. You know, if you're just a viewer on YouTube or Facebook and you came along and saw a video, we'll still answer your questions. Either we have a video we've already done, or we'll do a new one. And I had a guy in Facebook today say, hey, I, you know, I'm asking for a friend. What if you, you know, you don't. What do you. You don't have to do a video every day. Maybe you're scrounging for material. And I'm like, dude, I ain't. I ain't never scrounging. The minute I don't feel like I got material, I'll stop. Until then, I'm not stopping. This has been fun. The last 288 days, I've answered a lot of questions for people all over the world. A lot of them are ground school members, others just viewers. And then I've just covered a lot of topics and things I've just always wanted to talk about that I've never covered before. So it's just been an absolute blast. And the daily video will continue until that point that I run out of things to talk about, which I don't foresee happening every time soon. And I really don't feel like I'm scrounging because every day, there is something to talk about every single day. Well, when you're blabbermouth like me. All right, thanks for tuning in for day 288. Subscribe to the channel. Click the bell when you do so you can be notified of our daily video. Every day, we talk about some type of a helicopter training topic. Whether it's just a general topic, specific topics, answering questions about our ground school, anything is pretty much fair game helicopter training related. So just keep tuning in every day, subscribe, click that bell and we will see you back tomorrow. Day 279 Peace out. It.
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