#3 Helicopter Check Ride Frequently Asked Questions

Have you dreamed of always flying helicopters? Could be a dream. Along with my dream of wanting to shoot a video by the ocean. Been wanting to do this for quite a while and now I'm getting my chance to do that. We can help you make your dreams come true. The first question a lot of people ask is how do I get started? Getting started, the best thing to do is just schedule an intro flight. Find a helicopter somewhere near your area and schedule an introductory flight and go out and get your first helicopter lesson. You can sit and think about it all day long, you can read books, watch these videos. But until you go out and try it, you're not going to know what it's really all about. And the actual flying experience speaks for itself once you go up. So if you want to know where to get started, schedule yourself an introductory flight and go out and give it a try. If you have high blood pressure, would you still be able to come a helicopter pilot? Now the course, that question would be one that you have to take to your medical examiner, which brings up a great point. A lot of people ask questions about their health and getting their medical certificate. You can have certain problems and still become a helicopter pilot. And we urge people, when they first start training to get your medical student pilot medical certificate right off the bat. Because if you start flying and then find out later that you have some kind of a medical problem, of course that drags out your training, costs you more money, and in the end maybe you would find that maybe you couldn't become a pilot. But there are a lot of different things, different health problems that you can have. And if they're monitored by a doctor and, and following certain guidelines, you can fly with certain medical problems. So that is a great question and I'm not going to even attempt to answer because high blood pressure probably depends on, you know, the medical examiner, your age, the other things going along with your health. So I wouldn't attempt to say for sure on that, but I would think that probably under a doctor's care, and if it wasn't too out of control, I would think that that probably would be okay. So that is a great question, but again, the main point is get a medical certificate early on. You don't have to get it before you start training. You can become a student pilot, start taking lessons, but a lot of people wait and they're ready to solo and they still don't have a medical certificate. So if they don't have that, they can't do the solo flight and continue on with the training. So then if you say you did get an appointment with medical examiner and you had some kind of a problem, then again that's going to drag out the training. So go do an aviation medical examiner early on and find out your health situation if there's any problems. You may be surprised on certain things that can be allowed and still fly. A lot of those questions come up, like, can I wear glasses? Yes, you can wear glasses. I've been wearing glasses for years. So any questions on your medical certificate and becoming a pilot? Go to an aviation medical examiner and get the test done right off the bat. And the other part of this young man's question, do you need a college or university to become a pilot? No, you don't. At this time, you only have to be a high school graduate. You have to have a diploma at this point. You do not have to have college or university. Now, with that being said, are there some companies that are now requiring potential pilots to have college or a college degree? Yes, there are. So by not having college, you may be limited on that specific job that you want by not having a college degree. But at this time, there is a lot of helicopter jobs that do not require a college education. I didn't get college. I've been lucky enough to do all the different forms I've wanted to do as far as jobs in the helicopter world, and it hasn't restricted me from any, but it could in the future. So if you're questioning whether you have to have college or not, I would say get it. Because as time goes on, I do believe there's probably going to become more of a requirement and probably more and more companies are going to start asking you to have that college degree. So not an absolute, but get it if at all possible. I would definitely get the college degree, but it's not mandatory. And the other last part of his question, how long will it take to complete your training? That is a good question. It's a great question. There are so many things that are involved in how long is your training going to take? I've heard of people that went from off the street to CFI in like eight or nine months. And to do that, you're going to have to have all the money available. You're going to have to commit yourself to studying and working at it full time to get through it in eight or nine months. So it can be done in a short time span like that, but I wouldn't recommend it. I think that would be a huge stress to try to get through it in that amount of time, but it can be done. And then we'll go to the other end of the spectrum. Use me, for example. I started in 97 and I didn't get my CFI until 2001 and it was because I was operating a business and trying to scrounge up the money for more training. And you know, like most of us are a lot of helicopter pilots. I struggled along the way and had different things that held me up with I failed my first private pilot checkride because I didn't have the ground knowledge I needed. Which to say is why I'm here and why I'm off for the helicopter online ground school that I currently have is due to that lack of knowledge that I had in the beginning. Everybody wants to fly. We all want to go fly. Nobody wants to do the ground part. The ground part is, in my opinion, 75% of learning to fly helicopters, 25% is the actual flying. So it can take three or four years to get to CFI from off the street or it could even take longer. It all depends on again, how much money do you have available? How well do you study on your own? There's just so many different factors on how long it's going to take to get your helicopter rating. And I tell people when they're looking at doing it as a career and they're and they're worried about the private and the commercial and the cfi. I say, you know what, get your private first, make the private your goal, start the training, get your medical, get to private pilot and when you get there, then the next step is commercial pilot and then you can get started on that. It can be overwhelming if you look at the total cost and the time. So my opinion focus on that private rating first and go from there. So that's three great questions from one of our young subscribers who's in high school and looking at becoming a pilot later on. So if you have any questions you'd like answered, leave them in the comment box below. Thanks for stopping by and we'll be back again tomorrow for more questions. Thanks for stopping by and we'll see you soon. Question today is a good one. And question from one of our free members in our online ground school site. I have a private rating on a Schweitzer 300 CBI in 2010. Now I'm planning to do my commercial training. If I do my commercial on different helicopter, is that going to be a problem with getting a job or getting the rating? This is a great question and it doesn't really get Asked a lot. Maybe sometimes people don't think enough about this one in the beginning. And there's two big sides to this. Depending on where you're gonna try to get your first job at, you may just be willing to go anywhere. Maybe you want to work at a specific flight school in a specific aircraft. So. So the big thing is, when you go to get your first job, they're going to want to know, how much helicopter time do you have? And how much helicopter time in specific aircraft do you have? If you're trying to get a job on an R22 and you've only got 20 hours in the R22, that's not going to happen. There's certain regulations on the amount of time you have to have in the R22 to teach or if you're going to fly in the Sweitzer or the instrument, depending on where you go, things are going to be different with different flight schools. And the example I want to give. For four years, I was operating in Enstrom with a flight school, and the first insurance company I had. For the first three years, I battled with them constantly because I would train a guy, private commercial, cfi, and I'd want to put him on the insurance, and they'd say, well, have him get, you know, a total of 350 hours, and then 250 in F28F. And I would be really frustrated and say, what are you talking about? I trained the guy. He's familiar with my operation, my aircraft. And it was a very, very frustrating situation because who knows better my aircraft and my operation than somebody that I trained and did all their ratings with me? So I battled with that the whole time. And I was actually a Czech airman for that insurance company, and I still am today. But I didn't have any say or pull in getting someone insured. Then I changed in my last year, and the company I changed to, not only did they save me a little bit of money, they were very reputable. But they said, you hire who you want, we'll insure who you want. You're the instructor. Why should an insurance underwriter tell you who can safely operate your aircraft? And I was amazed. And I thought, wow, I wish I'd been using you guys three years ago, because that's the way it should be. So those are the kind of scenarios that you're gonna get into, is how much time you got to have in that specific aircraft. What is the insurance going to require? Everything in this industry, like everything else, is pretty much regulated by insurance. So that is going to be the main thing as far as getting your rating. You know, would it make it tougher if you did Switzer first and then you switched to another aircraft? I personally think the benefits outweigh the fact that it might cost you a little more money and might take you a few more hours to get that commercial rating. Switch into a different aircraft. But flying different aircraft is good. It takes you a little more time, you'll spend a little bit more money. But it's sure nice to get training and instruction in different styles of aircraft from different instructors. Because everybody has their own way of teaching. And two guys may teach the same maneuver, say a quick stop and they might teach them totally different. And it doesn't mean one guy's wrong and the other guy's right. They could both be a good maneuver as long as it's performed safely. You know, there's, there's a lot of benefit to flying those different aircraft and flying with different instructors and seeing the different ways people take teach. So it's a pretty open ended question. There's lots of things to think about. Do you have a specific place that you're going to want to fly and a specific aircraft? If that's the case, then you're probably going to want to stick with that one aircraft. If you're going to be searching around again, it's just kind of, you got to kind of look at what's going to be right for you. And getting that first job sometimes is very, very tough. For most everybody, that first job is the tough one. And it's usually the problem is having the amount of time in the aircraft that you're trying to get that job to fly is you don't have enough time in that specific make and model of aircraft. So I know that it may not answer the question to a T is what most people would like it to be answered. But that's pretty much the case. It's a great thing to fly different aircraft, fly with different instructors, get different experiences. Different experiences. There's a lot of good involved in all that. But just knowing that it could cause you a little bit trouble later when you're going to get that first job, when you don't have enough time in that specific aircraft. So hopefully that kind of answers that question and gives you a little bit of insight on that. And as far as making it the rating harder, I don't think so. I mean helicopters, they all have collective cyclics, pedals, they all fly virtually the same, virtually, but there are different characteristics. Buttons and switches are different places, you have different limitations. So although there are differences, they're still helicopters. So again, bottom line, I want to sum it up with. In my training I did Robinson, Schweitzer, Enstrom, between off the street up till cfi. It did take me about four years to get there and it took a lot of extra money because when every time I'd switch to a different aircraft I would have to kind of like back up and some things you kind of, not that you have to relearn anything, but you have to learn how to handle another aircraft differently and different emergency procedures and different performance things and so on. So I still think to this day for me, I'm glad I had that experience in the three different aircraft because it, it helped me just have a well rounded idea of kind of how all these different aircraft fly. And, and traveling around and flying in about five or six different states with different instructors in the end was a really good thing. But it did cost me more money, you know, did kind of delay the training. So these are all things that you want to think about when you're looking at what aircraft should I fly? Is it going to be hard to get the rating by switching to aircraft? And what about a job later? Hopefully that helps. Response to the question that I get a lot about commercial training, becoming a commercial helicopter pilot. And of course everybody wants to know what's it going to cost? The cost is pretty much can range from. I'm going to throw out a couple of numbers. I'm going to say I know guys have done it for around 50,000 and I know a guy that took almost 100,000, was 95,000 for all of his training, commercial CFI, instrument instructor, the whole work. So maybe even say in between there somewhere around 75,000, probably the get to commercial pilot, CFI. And again, it can vary so much on what type of helicopter you're going to fly, how long it takes, how hard you study, how frequently you fly. Along with that, people ask, well what about are there ways to save money for the commercial training after they get the private and absolutely there are. There's a lot of different things that you can do to help knock that total cost down. When I worked in Cleveland, I trained Jeff Kaza, who I've done a video about, who's now a Columbus officer and will soon be flying for the aviation unit. And he did his private commercial and CFI with me. And after he got his private and was going for his commercial, he would go to California and went out to Los Angeles and there was a place out there where you could go along in a Jet Ranger when they were going out and doing news reporting. And he flew with an instructor, and instructor would let him fly. And he was able to log time in the aircraft while they were out doing news reporting and doing. Doing some kind of filming. And in turn, he got a really cheap rate, like 100, $125 an hour to log helicopter time. And on top of that, it was turbine time. So there's a lot of different things like that a guy can do to save money to get through all your training. And there's other ways. You have to do the research, get online and get familiar with the different helicopter websites. But there's a lot of people that offer ferry flights. Like they're moving a helicopter from point A to point B will just say Cleveland to Florida, and they'll sell seat time for so much per hour you can go along. Usually you're responsible to pay for your own way back home, but you can get a pretty good chunk of time in an aircraft by going along on some of these different things and buying that seat on the aircraft. So there are a lot of things a guy can do to save money and get through the training. Bottom line, if you want to do it and you can get there, you it.