#51 Robinson vs Schweizer and Big School vs Small Flight School

Okay, I need your help today. Coffee drinkers, helicopter pilots, student pilots, Robinson versus Schweitzer and big school versus small school. Two part question from a helicopter online ground school member. He's already your member. His email said he wants to go off the street to CFI as fast as possible. Professional pilot membership does have 100% money back guarantee if you can see that or not. So this is a great question. I'm going to ask him for your help. So I want you to put your comments down below. I'm going to give some insight. But again, this one man, these are some great questions. So let's dive in. I'm Kenny Keller, creator of Helicopter Online Ground School. Welcome to day 51 of Coffee with Kenny. I am in my kitchen with my pajamas on, just got up drinking coffee, just made my daughter breakfast. It's a Sunday. We were coffee cup shopping and she picked out this coffee cup. Very cool. Nice cup. So to get to this member's question, I read it about six times so that I could remember the essence of his question and not bore you by sitting there and read the whole thing. Okay, so his question is, I've been researching flight schools, wants to go off the street to CFI as fast as possible. We've had two members now that went to Sevier county choppers and this is a fact. Six months off the street, double I, and they give them a job. So kudos to all those, to those members and to Sevier county choppers. So anyway, his question is. Oh yeah, and I'm Kenny Keller, creator, helicopter airline ground school. There is a link down below for 24 hour test drive for our all of our ground school training. Go check that out. Comment below on this video. I want to hear your feedback. So he says he's been researching schools. There's three in his area. Two of them have multiple R22s and R44s. Then he's looking at another school that has a Schweitzer. Okay, now his problem is he said the two of the schools have multiple R22s and R44s and multiple instructors. Schweitzer School is small. One man, one helicopter, one instructor operation. Okay, so this can go both ways. He's concerned. He thinks that he'll get through the ratings faster at the bigger schools with more helicopters. He's more worried about, you know, one aircraft breaking and being out of service. I get it. He's worried about the attention, worrying about the scheduling. So scheduling can be an issue at any flight school. Of course. Helicopters break. I know I've heard a lot of people say, well, they were at a busy flight school and they could hardly ever get on the schedule. So we know, we hear that small school, one aircraft, one aircraft goes down. How long is it going to take to fix that one aircraft? Okay, so you can kind of see the problem here both ways. And then he's also asking about job opportunities. He goes, you know, then, because I'm kind of liking the Schweitzer, but what am I going to do later when I go to get a job? I've done a couple videos on these subjects, and I'll put them down below. One of them is insurance requirements. Right. No matter what you do, when you go to get that first job, they're going to want to know, how much time do you have in the aircraft that we have here? So we know that Robinson is the number one civil aircraft in the world. It's the number one trainer out there. They're everywhere. So you're going to be more marketable with a Robinson. And with Robinson training, you're going to need every single hour you can get to be certified in those aircraft. R22 and R44, both, they're going to their special requirements. You got to have a lot of certain amount of time in each. There are those restrictions. Schweitzer, you don't have that. Then there's the question of parts for Schweitzers. Schweitzer is a great little helicopter man. Time tested, time proven, been around forever. Military used them, what a great aircraft. But then we hear the problems, and we've heard for years, you know, the last several years, specifically about parts being hard to find for Schweitzers. So what's going to happen with the Schweitzer? You know, there's a company that has revitalized it and are working on it. Last year at Heli Expo, we went to their open house thing they had, and I went there with Taz Christman, 2018 Flight Instructor of the Year, who you see in our instrument training videos. And Taz invited me to go with them and. And we heard this new company talk about everything that they're doing and, you know, working on getting the parts available, and there's just a lot of struggles in that area right now. So swipes are great little aircraft. What's going to happen in the future? So that's a lot of stuff to think about. And as much as I'd love to answer his question for him, he still has to make this decision on his own. And I'M almost leaning towards telling him you better go with the R22 R44 because of what you want to do in the industry. And he did mention in his email these three flight schools are all within his area. Okay. So he could drive to any one of those. Let me go back to the one man operation again. If the aircraft doesn't break, you could be getting some really good specialized instruction with one person, one instructor. We have two instruments here. We only allow one student at a time so you don't fight with other students. When we bring somebody in, you're it. We train with you every day till you're either done or you're needing to take a break and go back home or whatever the case is. So we're different though. We're helicopter land, ground school. We do online training as our focus. Full time job keeps roofs over our heads. We fly because we want to, we fly because we can. So we have two aircraft. So we go one to back the other one up again. Any one flight school can have a great reputation or not so great reputation. There are so many things to consider. But I think probably hands down the way to go for him. Now I'm not going to say hands down, that's wrong for him. Probably the R22 is probably going to be the way to go. Just because if you want to go off the street to CFI double I as fast as possible and make yourself the most marketable to get to the most jobs. Robinson is the clear answer. Flip side of that, back when I started ground school, just before it easing out of the aircraft I owned and all the struggles I had with aircraft ownership and one small operation, one man, one aircraft and I looked at going to work at a down in North Carolina on the ocean and this guy has a bunch of R22s and R44s and I had experience in both of those. Right. Plus Instrumentime and he said, you know what, that's cool. You're marketable because you're different. You got Robinson R22 and R44, but you've got instrumentime. Almost nobody has that. So that you know there's something else that can make you different by having experience in an aircraft. Not as popular Schweitzer or Enstrom. Put your comments down below. Let's see if we can help this young man make his decision. Again, he is a helicopter only in ground school, professional pilot member and we appreciate that. So he's got the right thinking by he can go through the videos, get his mind in the mode of Training and learning as much as he can before he starts. He's been a member since October, we're in February for this video. So, you know, he's been going through the videos. He's getting ready, he's making his choices, getting ready to pull that trigger. Let's help him out by getting these conversations going down below and really kind of help him try to sort through this because it's a big deal. Right when you're wanting to jump out into the industry and you're looking at the time and the effort and the money and off the streets is double eye. And he's going to hit it hard. So many things to consider. You know, do you want to be a road dog or not? And for this young man, does he want to work local? If you're going to work local and you want to try to work between those three schools, two of them have the same aircraft, one of them has a different aircraft. So you've got two choices of getting a job at this one. You go the smaller route with the aircraft not as available. What if that aircraft breaks? That company goes out of business. I know what I'm kind of leaning towards for him, just saying ultimately, if he could train it, both would be great. Do the majority of the time in the Robinson, get some Schweitzer time. Get that Schweitzer time under your belt. There's a good option for him now that I'm thinking about it. When I got started, I did all my ratings in the R22 as far as taking the test. But along the way I had Schweitzer time and along the way I had instrument time. So then once I got started my career, I got hired by a company that had an instrument. I had low instrument time, but they hired me because of that and then they bought a Schweitzer and I had some hours in the Schweitzer from back in my private days. That's actually the helicopter I was flying when I failed my first checkride. And then I switched the R22 different school and finished up. So I got hired. So that that school that flew the instrument, they bought a Schweitzer. Boom. I just needed a refresher and I was still employed because I had instrument time and I had Schweitzer time. Lots of things to consider. Put your comments down below. Please give us a like on the video. Please subscribe to the channel. Click the bell. Put your comments down below. Helicopter land ground school 24 hour test drive down below@helopterground.com you can take any one of our courses private, commercial, CFI, instrument all of them. You can go monthly you can keep it one month as a refresher you can keep as many months as you want you can cancel any time you can when you're ready to cancel remove your credit card from settings or if you're a PayPal customer or you signed up with PayPal just go into PayPal and discontinue your subscription you can do that yourself we can also do it for you it'll work faster for you just to do it on your own again we can do it for you 24 hours check out the training if it's what you if you're if you like it and you want to continue on continue on if it's not right for you be part as friends remove your credit card you're welcome back anytime so again I'm Kenny Keller helicopter only ground school thanks for stopping by enjoying a cup of coffee and we shall see you all in the next.