Kenny Keller explains why most flight schools don't provide helmets to students: cost and tight cabin space in small helicopters like the R22. He shares his experience with expensive Alpha helmets issued for EMS work and asks viewers for helmet recommendations.
Hey, got a question today from one of our professional pilot members and he asked what's the deal on helicopter pilot helmets? And I'm going to read to you here what he says, what his question is and I'm going to give my opinion on it. But he also asked also what helmet would you recommend? So I want to put that out there for those of you using helmets, if you want to put it down below to help out this ground school member of ours, again, one of our professional pilot members put it down below what helmet you use or what you recommend or don't recommend. So he asked me yesterday, said, hey Kenny, what's the deal on helmets? I'm a student moving towards private. In the R22, we don't use helmets. I believe we should, but I noticed most don't. If I owned a school, I think I would make helmets mandatory. I'm gonna make a guess why most helicopter flight schools aren't using helmets. It's probably gonna be cost. My experience with helmets were when I flew EMS for five years, they issued us helmets. Of course they were brand new and those were very expensive. Those were in the thousands of dollars. So I'm going to guess that. I don't think it's even a guess. I've operated just a flight school alone before. Flight schools are hard to, they're not a huge money making business normally. I mean there are some ones out there that, some that do really well. But the average flight school is struggling to take care of the helicopter, pay the bills, pay the insurance, pay their instructors, take care of hangar rent, feed. So most flight schools probably just aren't going to be able to afford a helmet. I think that's probably going to be the main thing. And then number two, you got to think about the size of the aircraft. I wore helmets in the EC135 and BK117. Wasn't a big deal. Occasionally, you know, you're kind of bonking your head on the, on the side over here. But like today I'm in the instrument. Okay, so this is even closer. And if the R22 was here, it's out flying right now. Or I'd have jumped in there with R22, you're going to even have less room. So if you're a tall individual and you got a helmet on, you're probably going to be smacking your head half the time over here or bonking it up there. So helmets are great. If you have the money for them and you got the room and they fit and they're comfortable helmets are great. But just to answer his question, I think the majority of flight schools don't have helmets due to cost number one and then having the smaller aircraft. So put your comments down below. Help out this gentleman, let him know what your thoughts on the helmets that you're using. The ones we used in ems, they were alpha nice helmets but they were really expensive and I don't want to say how much because then someone tell me that my quote's wrong. But they were expensive so I don't use one now I just use headsets. I'm perfectly happy with a headset. I'm sure that you know, of course a helmet is probably going to be safer in the event you got in a wreck. So if it works for you and you can afford it and it works in your aircraft, great. So why we got you here? Subscribe to our channel for future videos and updates. You know we do updates on our training, we offer specials, we put out free content on different things just to let people know kind of know what we do and show us the content from our helicopter land ground school. So we got private commercial instrument certified flight instructor and then we got a whole package Professional pilot that covers it all. So you can always go to helicopterground.com that links down below. Please subscribe so you get future updates and we'll put some other links down there for our Amazon number one best selling books. I have one called Helicopter Check Ride. Been in the top 100 for four years now. Put a link down there. You can get it for seven bucks if you want the paperback copy where we ship you the book. We pay the ship, we pay the you pay the shipping. We already bought the book. And then our top 10 checkride tips Tas Christman, 2018 Flight Instructor of the Year co authored a book with me. Hit Amazon and world bestseller in like four hours when we released it this past summer. It's called Top 10 Checkride Tips. I'll put that link down below too and eventually want to grab a copy of that. We have free PDF copies of them available and they're also available. Ebook is available on Amazon and so is the paperback but this is a special deal as long as they last either paperback for 7 bucks. Shipping handling we ship to you. So thanks all of you for checking out the video today. Please leave your comments below. Make sure you subscribe and we shall see the next video.
