#294 "how do I know if it's a good flight school?" - Coffee With Kenny Live

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What is today?

290 something 4. 294.

294.

Coffee with Kenny. Welcome.

Heck yeah. We're gonna talk about shortly. How do you know if it's a good flight school or not? And this is from a YouTube viewer last night after the video that Heather and I did last night talking about all kind stuff, helicopter training related and viewer said, well, hey, if I schedule an intro flight, how do I know if it's a good school or not? So we're gonna get to that in just a minute. But first we want to get it catch up on a couple of our recent HOGS members. So first we've got Chris Bowden. I'm gonna let you let Heather relay to you the email that Chris sent in.

Awesome. Chris says hello Kenny, I wanted to take a moment to thank you and HOGS today I passed my private pilot helicopter add on checkride and I could not have done it without your program. Between the online ground school and coffee with Kenny, I was able to get through the course and go back and re watch certain areas to make sure I was prepared and stayed motivated. I think while the preparation part is obviously important, the underappreciated part is the motivation which you're great at. When I would get frustrated and question whether or not I could pull this off, it was the way that you present your videos and the coffee with Kenny's that would help me stay engaged. Thanks again. Gotta let the whole. Gotta let the old checking account rebound for a couple of months and then on to commercial.

That's awesome. That again is Chris Bowden, right?

Yeah. And then he said, thanks Heather. Proud to be a part of the club and it's and hope to inspire others to follow.

Thanks for sending that in, Chris. That is awesome. As you know, the Hogswell over here is full. We've started mounting pictures up the stairway by Heather's office. So we'll show you that when we get a few more up. But we wanted to catch up the pictures. We got a couple more that we'll show in the next couple days because I like to do them right as they come in. But we've fallen behind everything going on. And then we mentioned Tor yesterday, but Heather wasn't exactly sure the details. So here's Tor and what did Tor have to say to us?

Okay, so this was back in April, his first testimonial he sent in just kind of saying, hi Heather, I am the mechanic and now pilot on a double VIP EC155 here on Borino Island, East Malaysia. I got my private in five weeks from start to finish with precision helicopters in Oregon, oh in July of last year. Since then I now got about 90 hours on the 155 and starting to get ready for my commercial sometime this summer. Your videos have been a great supplement to all the other dry reading and has been a big help. Thank you and your great content and best regards then. So this one is. Hi Heather. Here's another picture for your wall. I got my commercial after doing a full part 141 course in five weeks.

Nice.

Thank you for the help and keep up the great work. Tor Stenberg.

So there you go. Thank you, Tor. And that is a cool picture. And we know this because we've been posting some pictures on the Internet. Heather posted this on Instagram and a lot of good activity and she also posted it to Facebook and one of the most liked photos we've had lately. And I think it probably might be partially because of the Cadbury, but people are really digging this photo. So brings up go see our Instagram. Heather's got a lot of time in it and we need some more love on the Instagram page.

So follow us.

Helicopterground, right?

Yep.

So there's two and we'll get a couple more of them cut up in the next couple days. And then you had a couple emails you wanted to mention?

Yeah, we get so many great emails that sometimes I just. We just don't have a lot of time to share them with each other. So I just grabbed a couple more recently. Just a couple small ones. Hi Heather. My ins. My instructor recommended hogs. His name is Charles Robinson. Shout out to with Orbic Helicopters in Camarillo, California. He's one of the good ones. Thanks for creating this valuable aviation content. Blue skies. Rusty Robinson.

Rusty. Rusty. Thank you, Rusty. We appreciate it. That's awesome.

Yeah. And then we have Norm Smith. Thank you Heather for the warm welcome. I've enjoyed the site and got a taste of coffee with Kenny from YouTube. I'll be checking out the instrument specific training section as well. About 15 hours into flight lessons here in Houston, Texas. Regards, Norman.

Hell yeah, Norman.

Thank you.

Awesome. Thanks for sharing those stories. We love it. I want to mention the Halloween sale does end tomorrow night. But for if anybody taking care of or taking stuff on the yearly membership know it's a yearly and for past members, if you happen across this window. Window, duh. It's the thing about live, we don't know. Can't mess up or can't fix the screw ups. The yearly is a membership. So if you sign up this Halloween on the special or you sign up anytime on the yearly, know that it will renew in one year, anytime during that year. You can unsubscribe yourself by taking your go to settings in the left hand corner. Go in, remove your credit card or if you sign up with PayPal, go into PayPal. You have a full year to take.

That out or upgrade.

Or upgrade. Yeah, we haven't done much of that lately.

You know, if you, if you get your rating or you decide you want to get commercial, just hop in there.

And you want to upgrade to professional pilot. So you can always. Sure, we'll always give credit towards money you've paid for. Like if you want to upgrade, we'll always do upgrades for you. But most people understand it's yearly. But occasionally I get an email, Kenny, I didn't understand this was yearly. I'm like, well, it says subscription, it says yearly, it says membership. But, but anyway, just so you know, a little thought process there. So what else is going to talk about? Oh yeah, and then you can give me some input. What you would think if you were going to your introductory flight. And I thought about this question from the viewer who said, hey, you know, okay, I'm ready, I want to go schedule an introductory flight. But how do I know if it's a good flight school? Well, number one, yes, it's a concern. It's the same as any product or service out there, right? You need to do a little bit of research. What are the standard forms? Check Google reviews. But calling them up and the first thing I would say, number one, do they answer their phone? Number two, do they return your call? And if they do, are they pleasant? Do they take care of you? Do they answer your questions? And then when you go visit the flight school, is the flight school clean or not? How's their aircraft look? Does it look like it's well maintained or does it look like it's a beater piece of shit? You know, you got to take the totality of the circumstances and there's no way that I can answer that question in one shot. Yesterday Heather mentioned something about going with your gut. There's got to be a little gut instinct too there, right? So don't go back to the. I'm not going to do anything because I'm worried about the flight school. I'm going to do an intro. That's not a good school. Flight schools are regulated by the faa. Most flight schools are good, right? You Might get some fly by night shady places here and there. But I wouldn't spend a lot of time worrying about your intro flight. How do they treat you? Does the machine look good? Check the reputation locally, see if you can talk to one or two of their current students and just do the research. There's no absolute answer for this, Anything you can think of that, I mean, I don't know. It's like I said, any product or service.

No. Pretty much that's it. Just. Yeah, go with your gut. Because people, you might, you know, choose somewhere just because you're gonna save a bunch of money. And sometimes you get what you pay for, right?

And you're gonna, you get what you pay for and you're gonna get a feel once you get started. And that's why it's a good idea to go ahead and if you schedule an intro and then you want to start taking lessons, go check out a couple different places, check out some different instructors, check out some different aircraft, and you're gonna get a feel for it. You got to use some of your own. Again, we can't hold your hand. We'd love to, but we can't. You gotta, you gotta go out and just do it. And if you sit around worrying about is that flight school gonna be a good flight school or not? Get out there and find out would be the only thing I could think of to say.

Yeah, it's like us girls and going to a hairstylist. Sometimes you feel like you're cheating on one hairstylist, but sometimes you gotta bounce around to see who's gonna do.

That is exactly right. That is exactly right. And we talk about this a lot, how student gets comfortable with one instructor, one helicopter. They don't want to switch helicopters. They don't want to switch instructors. That's common. Everybody does it. I remember when I didn't want to do it, but I'm telling you, after 20 years of being around this, flying with different instructors is good. Flying different aircraft is good. Flying at different locations is good. It will give you a more rounded sense of what this industry is all about. The getting the different experiences. Yes. Cost you more money, but it's worth it. You learn something different from every single person you go fly with. All right, I'm thinking I'll wrap that up for 294. Tomorrow's 295. Halloween.

Yeah, tomorrow's it, tomorrow's it.

Midnight.

Midnight.

I'll put a link down below for the Halloween special. It's very simple. It's helicopterground. Dot com.

Halloween hogs can help ease your overwhelm. Or you'll end up looking like this guy. All stressed out.

Exactly. With our help, you can avoid this poor student back here. I need to come up with a name for our scared stiff student.

It'll come to us.

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