Kenny Keller breaks down helicopter insurance for students, instructors, and owners. Insurers require specific make-and-model flight hours: a student needs roughly 20 hours solo, while a turbine helicopter owner faced $70,000 yearly premiums. Research your aircraft type early, because insurance requirements can lock you out of jobs.
Questions this video answers
January 10, 2019.
Around 20 hours.
About $1.16 million.
About $70,000 per year (the owner chose to self-insure).
From $18,000 per year down to $10,000 per year.
Chapters
Hey, it's Kenny with Helicopter Line Ground School. And I want to cover a question today about insurance requirements. We get a lot of different questions, actually. So I want to hit it from kind of a student perspective moving forward. Who. For someone who's going to want to try to teach in a helicopter later after getting their instructor rating, and then kind of towards private owners as well. And a little bit about turbine requirements. So the first thing you need to know, if you're starting out and you're wanting to do the professional pilot route, sorry, go to your. To the CFI level and get a job. The one thing you're going to need to research is where are you living and where is it you're going to want to work. Most popular trainers, the R22. There's Enstrom's out there, there's Switzer's, there's the Cabri. A lot of different makes and models. When you go to get your first job, they're going to know how much time do you have in the aircraft. And R22 and R44 has certain hour requirements before you can teach as well. So before you, you know, jump in full fledged, think about what aircraft are you going to be flying. If you're going to work at a flight school where they have R22s and R44s, you're going to want to get the majority of your training in the Robinson aircraft to help yourself later to be qualified for the insurance. Insurance companies are different. This is another one. Solar requirements. The. We get this question a lot. Well, how many hours it takes to solo or how many do I have to have? Some insurance companies require a certain amount of hours, some do not. So it depends on the flight school and who their insurance carrier is. So that's another thing that you want to look at. Average student solo is around 20 hours. Some people do it less, some people do it more. And again, sometimes flight schools or insurance companies will have a required minimum before you can solo. So you really need to kind of research and think about what aircraft do I want to fly once I start teaching. And then another one, Cushion just came in. A gentleman sent me a email and he said, hey, I'm gonna be training in the MD 500. And I'm wondering why should be training in the Robinson. But he goes, I want to buy a turbine aircraft later. And I said, well, if you're gonna be buying your own turbine aircraft, I would recommend staying in the MD500 if you can afford it and do that training in the MD500. Because then that way when you go to get insurance, hopefully you'll be able to get insured quicker. And he's like, well, that's kind of interesting. You know, he didn't really understand. So I elaborated and said, look, when you go to get insured in a turbine aircraft, they're going to know how much turbine time do you have? And I'll give you an example of one of my private students who bought his own helicopter, brand new from instrument, from $1.16 million, I think. And when he checked in, insurance for him to be insured was going to be like $70,000 a year, okay? So he decides to self insure and the guy said, hey, if I trash the helicopter, if I lost a million, yeah, it'd sting a little bit, but it's not going to hurt me. So for the average person, that's kind of hard to swallow, right? So if you're going to be struggling to financially do this, whether you're teaching or whether you're going to own your own aircraft, the insurance part of it really is going to be an important part of it because insurance regulates everything we do, right or wrong. There's a lot of really ridiculous requirements out there. You'll see sometimes it's just the way it is. So at different levels, different job placement, they're going to require different things, amount of hours. So I just want to kind of help save you some headache and heartache down the road because you might train in one aircraft, thinking you want to go to work at a certain flight school, and then you find out, well, I don't have any time on that aircraft and you can't get insurance. So there are a ton of different variables on what you're going to be able to do and what you're not going to be able to do. So I highly recommend doing a little research on your own, depending on what you're going to do and what you want to do in the future. So put your comments down below. Be kind of an interesting discussion to get going down in the comments because this is one that people really don't talk about a lot of times. And people are upset, right? When they go do a bunch of training, they go to get a job and they say, oh, well, sorry, you know, you don't have enough time in this specific aircraft. So it is something that you really want to spend some time on. So please give us a like and a share on this video. Put your comment down below about insurance, what you've experienced. I can tell you one frustrating thing I was insured by one insurance company that was affiliated with the factory for specific model of aircraft. Not going to say the name, but I train a guy, private commercial cfi. I go to put him on the insurance to fly for me and they go, oh, well, have your guy go get 350 and make and model and then we'll insure him. And I'm like, are you kidding me? This guy just trained with me all of his ratings in my aircraft at my home base. And you want 350 hours? Are you flipping crazy? Luckily, another industry professional I told the story to and he said, hey, that's a bunch of bull. Call my insurance guy. So I called a different company. I got a. I went from 18,000 a year to 10,000 a year in insurance. And this company said, look, you're the expert, you hire who you want, just give us the information, we'll add them to your insurance as long as you're comfortable with them. We're not going to sit here and dictate who can you fly with and who can you not. So here goes. Here, here's this business, this insurance company who I was a Czech airman for and still am, where I can approve pilots to be on their insurance company or on their insurance policy, but they wouldn't insure somebody I trained to put in my own aircraft. So needless to say, I dropped that company, went with the one for about half the money, who doesn't restrict me on who flies the aircraft, who solos, who does not, so on, so forth. So again, just from my experience, you need to look into this, spend a little time to save headache and heartache later. So please, do me a favor, subscribe the channel if you haven't like and share. Put your comments down below and we'll see the next video.
