Autorotation Training Tips From Live Training Tuesday

Sam.

Sarah, Cleveland here with helicopter ground.

Kenny on the console with the sound and the cameras. And I think we have our sound taken care of now. Sorry about the technical difficulty.

Oh, let me go over here and turn this down.

I want to remind you that if you have checkride success, send us a picture of yourself in your helicopter and we'll give you the I'm safe checklist that you can slap on the fridge or the locker at the hangar to remind you of your checklist to go down through. Make sure you have your medical certificate, your pilot's license, your driver's license. Make sure you're fit to fly proper pre flight. We like to give these away just as a reminder that you used HOGS to get your rating. And you always have to use this checklist throughout your career, throughout your flying time. And if you send us a short video of you and your helicopter talking about how hogs helped you to get your rating, we will send you T shirt for free that says I did it with hogs. I know a lot of people attribute HOGS or helicopter online ground school to getting their ratings and they tell us all the time in emails and we're just, we'd like to juice it up a little bit with a nice little video or a photograph to put on our site so other members can see it. Kenny's ready to roll here with his camera now.

Alright, here we go.

Alright, so that's what happens sometimes. Courtney's not here today so I'm trying to run everything here at our main console. Normally Courtney's over there taking comments and talking to everybody. So that's why I started up and last minute I screwed up the audio. So I want to go back to where I started. Everybody that's here. I don't mention everybody that's here. Juanita Falk. Juanita bought, I believe 3-1-2012 one of my very first members of all time. Met her at HAI last year. That was awesome. Meeting her firsthand. That is awesome. She's here. Xavier Gomez. Hello everyone. Pensacola, Florida at the ready. Jessica Maris. Greetings from Colorado. MAX Flight helicopter. Max Flight helicopters. Kissimmee here, Florida. Taz checking in. Taz you see in our new instrument course. So if you don't realize we have a new instrument course. We have an instrument course along with our private membership commercial cfi. And now we have instrument course and Taz gets credit for a large majority of those videos in there. And Taz does an incredible job. T. Gregory Berry. Todd here. Greetings from Washington D.C. fred Bedard. Hello From Boston, James. Morning. James here from Washington. That's awesome. Rick say no audio. That's where we realized, whoops, we didn't have any audio. So again, I screwed up. So no audio, no sound, can't hear you. And then Mark Daniels. It is my training Tuesday. Yeah, that's pretty funny. Radio check. That's funny. I can't hear you. 7,600. That's awesome. Somebody squawking 7,600. That is funny. I like that. Very funny. That's good. All good now. Paul from krfd. Man, we got a great crowd today. Ron from Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. Joe watching from Belgium. Mad Mike from Charlottesville, Virginia. Paul G. Rockford, Illinois. Steve, Grand Forks, North Dakota. Awesome. Will we be doing Q&As? Yes, we will. We want to keep today about. Let me get back to the main camera here. We'll come back and check again. Let me put in the disclaimer. Normally Courtney's over there taking care of comments for us and saying hi to everybody. And then she puts the questions onto a screen. So Gary and I can be presenting and Taz or Tannen or Chris, whoever else is here. So I'm trying to monitor comments and present today. So bear with us. We'll do the best we can with just two of us. You know, it's a long way from where I started back three, four, five years ago trying to do this stuff by myself. Come a long way. So today is about auto rotations. We'll get to it. I want to roll my the first video is a video I made a couple years ago on my top 10 tips. I reviewed the video again last night before deciding what and what videos we wanted to roll today. And we're going to roll the top 10 tips first just because I reviewed them and thought, you know what, I feel strongly about them today as what I did 10 years or two years ago when I made this video. A lot of basics of the auto rotation. If you do a lot of the simple stuff and remember the basics, you can make auto rotations not quite as intimidating as what they are. They are intimidating in the beginning, but the more you get comfortable with them and when you learn the good techniques, they get a little bit easier. So we're going to run my top 10 tips first. We'll run that. We'll be checking videos, comments and questions. We'll get those ready to answer after the first video. Then we're going to show a couple others. We're going to talk about 90 degree autos lead into 180 autos. We're going to roll a video with me and Holly from our CFI where we went out and did a bunch of foldowns. I'm going to show you a straight in full down and a 180 fold down video and talk about those too. Because a lot of people don't are intimidated by the full down auto rotations. And once you learn them, you realize that sometimes for a lot of people that's actually a full down is easier than a straight in or a I'm sorry, a full down is actually easier for some people than a power recovery and one talk about that. So we're going to run the first 10 tips. We'll start taking your questions, communicate with you in chat, and we'll be back in about 10 minutes. So here's the video on the top 10 tips.

Hello, I'm Kenny Keller, the creator of Helicopter Align Ground school and I want to give you my top 10 best auto rotation practice tips. Number one, you need to have a nice entry. If you enter it nice, it's going to be nice. If you enter it sloppy, it's going to be sloppy. So in this case we'll use the R44 example. These tips are pretty common. No matter what aircraft I fly in, it doesn't really matter. R44, Enstrom, Jet Ranger, it doesn't matter. The elements of a good auto, the majority of them are the same. In this example we use 70 for Airspeed 500 AGL when we enter and.

I want to be at zero rate.

Ascent when I enter. So we want to give ourselves enough time that when we get to our entry point we can have a nice entry again, zero vertical speed, dark airspeed entry that we need, the altitude we want and the trim that we want. I've heard my examiner say many times during the CheckRide, private commercial CFI. If it takes you 10 minutes to get set up for the straight in auto, take 10 minutes to get set up for the straight in auto. You want to have everything ready to go. You want to feel good about it so you have a nice entry. If you enter it nice, it'll be nice. You enter a sloppy, it's gonna be sloppy. Number two, you need a small aft cyclic pulled entry. So we talked about having everything set up. I like to use 70 for the glide in the R44, 60 in the instrument doesn't matter. Whatever aircraft you're flying, you're gonna have your, your glide speed. I enter about 75 in the R44 so that when I enter and I give that small aft cyclic pull. The nose does not dive. So you're setting your speed when you enter the auto rotation with a small aft cyclic pull. And if you do that and you set your speed correctly at the beginning, chances are you'll have a nice glide going down. If you screw up the speed at the beginning, then you'll start going forward, backward, airspeed up and down, rpm, trim, everything kind of goes wacky. So getting that arp or getting that speed set at the beginning is very, very important. Number three, you need three things simultaneously at that entry. We just mentioned the aft cyclic.

So you need a little bit of aft cyclic, a little bit of right.

Pedal, whatever it takes to put yourself in trim and also lower the collective. All three of these things should be done together.

If you do one, then the other.

Then the other, then you're kind of just monkeying the thing around and it's not going to be that nice. You need to do all three of these entry points, aft cyclic, right pedal, down collective, all simultaneously. Number four, roll off on a throttle to split your needles. No throttle chops. Back in the old days, they taught chop that throttle all the way off. Well, when you do a throttle chop, you have a chance of the engine actually stopping, and then you're going for a real engine failure when you're trying to do a practice engine failure. So you want to roll off enough throttle to split the needles. Do it smoothly, gently, and split the needles to the point that's appropriate for the aircraft that you're flying. Control your airspeed during the glide. So in this example, we're using 70. If you set it right and you get a 70 and you don't start moving that cyclic around, keep that airspeed nice, then it makes everything nice again. You start messing with airspeed, then things change with rpm, so on, so forth. So really work on focusing inside, outside, you have a cross check inside your airspeed outside your spot, inside, at RPM outside, look at your spot. Inside, trim outside to your spot. You want to really focus on keeping that airspeed steady. Number six, raise enough collective smoothly to control RPM on most aircraft. Depending on the day after you enter, the RPM is going to start to rise and you're probably going to pull up collective a little bit. Now, this could be different on varying aircraft. I'm not saying in every single instance, but most generally after you enter it, the RPM is going to start to rise. So be prepared and know there's going to rise on you and just start raising a little bit of collective ahead of Time to keep it from getting too high. If you catch it early, it just makes the auto nice. If you wait till the RPM is too high, then you're making more of an abrupt up movement with the collective, and it just makes things messy. So not only you're focusing on your airspeed, your trim, you're really focusing on keeping that RPM under control. Number seven, maintain trim during the glide. I can tell you it's amazing. If you get that trim in there and you have the aircraft trimmed into the wind, it actually seems like it comes down a little bit slower. It's more controlled, and a lot of people will enter it. They'll put in the pedal, but not enough or too much, and they come down out of trim. If you fly the thing in trim, no matter what your aircraft it is, it will come down what seems like slower by being in trim. Number eight, set RPM close to range, where the needles will join when the throttle is added.

So, again, this could vary a little.

Bit depending on the aircraft or maybe an instructor, the way a person, a certain instructor wants you to do it. But in general, about halfway through the green range is pretty usually close to the actual operating range for the engine. So that could vary on instructor and technique. I'm just saying, in general, you know, high isn't necessarily the best and low isn't necessarily the best. Usually about halfway through the green range. And again, depending on the aircraft and depending on circumstances, if you're trying to stretch a glide, you might go to the lower side of the rpm. So there are other factors to take into consideration. This is just kind of an in general, rather versus being too high or too low, I like to be about the center of the green RPM range. For the rotor system. Number nine, start with a gentle flare at approximately treetop level. Now, again, depending on what aircraft you're flying, it may say, start your flare at 40ft. It may say 50ft, it may say 100ft. So again, it depends on the manufacturers recommendation on what point to start your flare. Personally, I use treetop level. It's hard for me to distinguish between 40ft, 50ft. I use the term treetop level. So as I'm coming down, I'm actually watching the tree line. And kind of as I pass the top of the tree line is when I start a gentle flare. So about tree top, I start a gentle flare, and as I get closer to the ground, I make it bigger. I make it bigger and make it bigger. And when the speed's almost gone, I level it out. Some people teach a More aggressive flare.

Where they get down closer to the.

Ground and pull it a lot harder at the very end and then level it back out. That's technique. So again, depending on your instructor, your flight school, the aircraft, I'm not saying my way is the only way. It's just what I have used over the years that works really well for me. Treetop level. I start to flare real gentle about treetop or little below treetop. As I get closer to the ground, I make it bigger and bigger and bigger because depending on the day, depending on the wind, if you're doing that flare more slowly, you can judge. I need a more aggressive flare today because I don't have a lot of wind, or if I don't have much wind, I might have to get more aggressive. So again, kind of a general rule and my technique number 10, when the speed is almost gone, level, and raise, roll on throttle. So again, a lot of this is technique, and depending on the aircraft you're flying, the conditions for the day and how heavy you are and the technique you're using. But still in auto rotation, it's when the speed's gone, it's level race, collective roll on the mount a throttle, you need to join the needles and be back in auto rotation. So working on that flare is going to be, you know, more of a thing where you're going to get probably the best instruction there with your instructor for whatever aircraft you're flying. But it is speed almost gone. Level, raise, roll in the appropriate throttle. So that was basically for one of our members that emailed me this morning, and he said, kenny, I'm really struggling with the autos.

And he gave me a long list.

Of the different problems he was having. And I just thought, you know, over the years of the teaching and all the different aircraft that I've flown and got the chance to instruct in the basics of the maneuver. The 10 tips I just gave you are pretty much what I think are the general elements of good auto. I just sat down and did the first 10 that come to mind. We could probably do another 30 of those on tips, but those are the top 10 that just came to mind. The things that I see that people struggle with, whether it's messing up the airspeed or messing up the trim or whatever the case is, those are the most common problems that I see. So let us know what you think down in the comment section below. If you're interested to learn more about helicopter online ground school, go to the link in the description box below. Click that link. Any questions you can email me@kennyelicoperground.com so give us a like, share some feedback and we'll see in the next video.

All right. And we're back. I want to mention a few more people that jumped in since the last time we mentioned. So let me do that first real quick. I think I remember about where I left off. Johan here. Did I mention Johan earlier? Johan is one of our success stories. I featured Johan in a couple of our videos. Johan's the one that did his rating in three weeks after preparing with Ground School. Great story about Johan. Awesome to see him here. John Fuller, Mark Schmidt from Sioux Falls, awesome. Taz in there, Greg Crump from New York City and awesome. So let's go over to the couple of comments that were made and I'll switch over to Gary here for a second. Let me get my ducks in a row.

Also I'm looking at somebody said is the process of settling with power the same in an auto rotation or does it not satisfy the 20 to 100% of power requirement? It absolutely does not meet the power requirement. So you're getting rid of one of the three things that can get you into settling with power so you're safe in an auto rotation.

Yes. Once you're. If you're in auto, you're no longer installing the power.

Right. So as a refresher, you have 300 descent on the VSI. You gotta be using 20 to 100% of power and moving forward less than ETL 1624.

Right. So auto rotation is a corrective action for slang with power.

Yes.

You can auto rotate to get out of it.

In fact, I believe the helicopter flying handbook says that auto rotation may be the only recovery if settling with power was to be fully developed.

Yep.

Next question. The Schweitzer handbook actually has warning about not chopping the power. We had an instructor that was used to fly in Robbies rolled the throttle completely off. He got into a real auto. That's correct. That's why we don't chop the throttle because sometimes the engine can can die on you. I actually had my rotorway die when I was running with some fadec errors and it went down to FADEC 2 and I did decided just to auto it into the Runway. Flying with a little bit of an attitude rolled it all the way down to an idle and the injectors on the Fadec II run on dummy values and it died. So there was a real auto on the Runway.

I want to add to that one a little bit. Go ahead. Make sure I Get my camera up here. When I started flying in 1997. So in 97, throttle chop was still a pretty common term. And people were still a lot of people were wrapping that thing off. And what Gary mentioned is right. And what we said in the video. And I know people, this has happened to you roll the throttle all the way off and sometimes the engine will die. And in an instrument, it'll happen. If you have a fuel servo issue getting ready to start, the aircraft will run just fine. But if you go all the way off, it'll die. And that's why we always make sure we do that during our pre takeoff check or pre liftoff check is rolled all the way off, which is part of the checklist. But also the engine will die if you have an upcoming fuel servo problem. But 20 years ago, throttle chop was still pretty common. And today you still hear some people say throttle chop. And I think the first I went to the Robinson factory back around probably around 2000, and that's where I first heard them start saying, look, we don't do throttle chops anymore. Too many people getting hurt. Too many people getting killed by chopping. The throttle engine really quits. And you went from a practice engine failure to a real failure and wreck the aircraft. I'll go back to Gary for the third statement or question we have there. I'll let you elaborate on that while I check for others.

And I guess along the same line of not doing throttle chops, that's why we practice auto rotations lined up with the Runway way so we got a nice spot should the engine quit. The Robinson safety course instructor apparently told somebody or showed how to use the trim during an auto to lose altitude. Now this is a little advanced from what I've practiced. So, Kenny, can you relate to that or comment?

Let me ask me again, I was trying to read comments there real fast. What's the question?

Who was it was talking about the Robinson safety course where an instructor showed how to lose altitude with the trim during an auto.

Yeah, that was Johan. So you could certainly do that. And I always think of it more of a. I like it in trim because it seems to come down slower. But you could move the trim whatever necessary to make it come down faster. I'm trying to keep it in to trim so I'd come down slower and a more coordinated auto. But certainly you could put it out of trim and come down even faster. I see. Does that make sense?

I see.

I'll jump over. There's a couple of things in YouTube here. Well actually what should we do? What time is it? 10:26. How about if we go ahead and roll the. We're going to talk next about 90 degree autos and 180 autos and I have a past video on that but we want to elaborate and talk about that a little bit. It's a kind of tip for people when you're moving into the 180s that help some people. And we'll talk about that in a minute. So I'm going to go ahead and roll the next video which is full down. No, wait a minute. Did I show the 90 degree video yet? No, I didn't.

Let's do that.

We'll go ahead and show the 90 degree video, catch up on questions. Gary and I'll get ready to cover what's came. What questions have come in since the last video. So let me get that one up. I'm realizing how much now we rely on Courtney to help us do this. So anyway, here we go. Here goes a video with me and Gary out in the R44 when I was kind of showing Gary this technique of using two 90 degree turns versus a 180. This is just something for thought and we'll come back and elaborate on a little bit. So we'll roll that video now.

Yeah.

Alright. So now we're going to build my 90 degree out of rotation. Back when I was a brand new instructor struggling with autos. Had an instructor come in to help me a little bit and he said you know what, let's go out and we'll start out with quick stops today. Always do quick stops at four autos. Then we'll do some straight ins, then we'll do some 90s and then we'll turn into the 180s. And I really like that because it seems like it's harder to make the full 180 turn. If you break it down into two 90 degree turns. It gives you time to make the decision. You enter, you turn, roll back out. You might delay a little bit before you turn or you might be ready just to go ahead and make your second 90 degree turn. Just kind of an alternative instead of trying to make judge the full 180. For me it's easier to do it in two 90 degree turns. So we're going to do a 90 degree turn just for fun. Again I'm going to try to hit the numbers 2.8. We'll see how close I get. I'm going to again enter at 70. 0 rated is. I'm going to do this one a little higher. I'm going to do this at 1500 MSL, about 700 AGL just to give myself a little more of a challenge to try to see how close I.

Can get to the numbers.

So we're going to go full carb heat. That's all the way on about 75. I got a climb going so I'm going to lower a little collective, start a left hand turn to get set up for my 90 degrees, get back to 1500 where I said I was going to be. Now see how good I can do.

Alright.

I don't like having a bunch of descent, I don't like being too slow, I don't like things being all whacked out. So I'm going to get it straightened out here. There's 1500, I need to get back to my seven. And you know what? Last minute I'm screwing around, I'm not set up nice. So what am I going to do? I am going to go around, I'm going to make a right 360 degree turn and I'm going to go around and get set up again because I was last minute trying to fix everything. And if I would have entered it, I can guarantee you it would have been a sloppy auto rotation. I wouldn't have been happy and then I'd be saying I wish I just.

Would have went around.

So when you're setting up these auto rotations, don't be too macho to go, you know what, I screwed that up. I don't feel good about it. I don't have the aircraft where I wanted it. I'm gonna go around and I'm gonna set it up again. Totally, totally, totally the key, good setup, feel good about it, have everything where you want it, then enter the auto rotation. Now some people say, well you know, if you ever have a real engine failure, it's just gonna quit.

You're not going to be at this and that and that.

Well, you know what, that's right. But you're going to deal with that in the real world. We're in training mode. We're training people to go take check rides. So for the training environment, yes, we want a nice standard. We want to have everything set up nice because we want a nice auto rotation because we want to perform well for the examiner so we can get our temporary certificate for whatever rating it is we're going after. So again the key is a good setup. I'm going to use 1500 70, zero rate of descent in trim. Yes, much better. I like it this time. So if I can keep that, not screw it up. Let's check carb heat again.

Yep.

Got full carpet. Got 70. 1500. I got a small descent light.

Honey Traffic Warrior 560R pop uniform is on a left downwind for Runway 18 white. Honey Traffic.

All right, got time to fix it. Little left pedal. 1500.

08 ascent.

Just need a little more speed. So here we go. 70, 1500 in trim, very small rated ascent. Looking good. I'm gonna guess right about now. 1, 2, 3, enter. Okay, looking good. Got 70 rpms. Good. I'm gonna start my turn. I'm gonna be kind of a lazy turn here. Really want to hit those numbers. I want to impress Gary, my camera operator over here. Getting ready to go for us commercial. There's the numbers 2.8. So I'm overshoot a little bit.

That's all right.

I don't care. So here comes the flare. Flare, flare, flare, flare. Level it out. Watch the forwards to the left. It was a real engine failure. We'd need a more aggressive flare and.

Get rid of that speed.

All right.

What do you think?

Anything else you want to say?

All right, we're back.

Good footage. Kenny's making his way up here to talk to you about 180s and 90s. And during the time that video is rolling we, we decided that we are going to shoot some more auto rotation of footage. Probably over the winter when we get some downtime. One thing I wanted to mention I cleared with Kenny at the end of the program today we're going to give a discount code for anybody who is not a member of helicopter online ground school. If you happen to have found us by signing up for the live Tuesday event and you don't have the rest of the goodies, we're going to give you a discount code to get you in there. So Kenny.

Awesome.

I'll take the cameras.

You can thank Gary Cleveland for that one. He's like hey, can we give a discount today? I'm like yeah, why not? Chief pilot. So he's gonna give you more details on that later. So we kind of let into this just to give you a brief description. We just rolled a video of Gary and I out there and I just wanted to reiterate this is something that is a tip, okay? Some people, and I've been training 20 years now, alright? Some people do fine making that nice smooth 180 turn, bringing it back out and hitting their spot and they have no problem. So that's great. If you can make it in a nice 180 turn and you can hit your spot and you have no problems with that. That's great. This 290 degree thing that I'm talking about. Literally, when I was a brand new instructor, I got the life scared out of me flying with the guy that I worked for who was 180 hour private pilot, weekend warrior. I was a brand new CFI and I wasn't really comfortable teaching autos. From the time from my CFI checkride to the time that I was actually out there teaching, you know, a few months had lapsed. So I asked the other cfi, also named Ken, I said, let's see if the owner will let us go out and practice some autos because we didn't really want to pay for it. And the owner says, well, let me go out with Ken, you know, well, that's not what I really wanted. I wanted to go out another cfi, but which they also say the most dangerous thing is two CFIs together. But I wanted to go out and practice some autos, but the owner wants to go out. So I, I just thought, okay, you know, he flies a lot, so he'll be good. And I wasn't really ready on the controls for things to go bad. And he's setting up for a 180 auto and I'm telling him, you know, make sure you take your time getting set up on this 180. And as I'm telling him to take his time, go out as far as he needs, he isn't listening to a darn word that I'm saying. He cranks it right around, hurries up, gets set up, enters the 180 and everything goes completely just crazy. He even finally just, I take over and I saved us. Luckily I saw the RPM go clear down to the minimum where Robin says, so you can't go. I went below that. Somehow we survived it. So I almost quit instructing. I was so freaking scared. I went home going, I'm done. You know, all these three or four years and all the money I spent and I don't even want to be an instructor. I took a couple days to think about it and I went back and talked to the examiner, who I did my private commercial with a guy named Jerry Ventrella. Awesome. You know, Vietnam veteran, been flying since ever, you know, he's done over 3,000 checkrides at that time, clear back then, and he's still giving checkrides today. But anyway, I told him the story and he kind of laughed at me. And he said, kenny, we all need that scare, you know, when you get in an aircraft, you never, ever, ever, you never believe the guy beside you is any better than you. You should have had your hands on the controls. You should have been ready to recover. You should have been ready. Don't ever let it happen again. So I hired an older instructor to come in who had like 4000 hours of R22 time. And he's like, you know, I told him the story on the phone, what happened? So he came in for a couple days. I paid out of my own pocket for his time and for the helicopter time, which I'd already spent everything I had and ruined myself the first time around just getting the ratings. And here I am plugging out more money. So the first thing when he comes in, he says, all right, let's sit down, do some ground, Kenny. So for a day, we start talking about quick stops, then we talked about straight ins, then we talked about 90s, and we talked about 180s, and we talked about fold downs. We covered everything on the ground and we went out and we did the quick stops first. And he got me really honed in on what, what the flare should look like. And they said, okay, now, Kenny, we're not going to go right into 180s and fold downs. We're going to do some straight ins.

With the power recovery.

Then we're going to do some. I'm going to show you something because I want to show you these two 90 degree turns and just see if this might help you. And when he showed it to me, I loved it. And I still do a nice swooping 180 turn sometimes. But there are times, depending on day, weight, altitude, whatever the case is, sometimes a 90 degree turn just works out better. And so what he showed me was he goes, kenny, let's first start out doing 90s. So we did the straight ends, practiced those first, and then we're. We started doing 90s where we just come from. At that airport, we'd come from the north, enter a rotation, make a 90 degree turn, go to our spot. So we perfected that. And he goes, okay, let's go do two 90s, and let's see how you like that. So we came around, and again on a 180, you need to take the time to go out and get set up. People make the mistake of, let's hurry up and get another one in before we go in. If you crank around and you don't have time to get set up and you enter at point some sloppy, it's going to come out sloppy. So he taught Me make sure you take enough time. Take all the time you need. Our examiner, or the examiner I've been using for 20 years says if.

The.

Keto auto is a good setup. And he said on checkrides, I don't care if you take 10 minutes to get set up for an auto, tell your students, take as much time as you need to get set up for these autos. So he showed me that, introduced me to that 90, that 290 degree turns and I just liked it. So again, I'm stressing this today because a lot of times I get questions from people working on their CFI or working on their commercial and private too, but mainly CFIs that will say, Kenny, I'm not. I was really struggling with the 180s or teaching the 180s. So I'm showing you this as an alternate method. Instead of trying to get a student to make a full 180 turn, start out with some 90s, introduce some to straight ins, introduce them to some 90s and then try two 90 degree turns. Because here's what I found is cool. You always want to enter about a beam your spot. But depending on the day, if you get started into that auto fairly quickly and make a nice turn, you get turned in. Sometimes you can wait. So on a certain day you make a 90 degree turn, level out and you can go, okay, I'm going to wait until about now and turn it and judge to get in your spot. Excuse me. To me it's harder to make that swooping 180 turn and hit my spot. If I turn it into two 90s, I can turn to a 90, level out and go, oh, okay, second 90 right now, roll right into it if I need it or if I want to delay a little bit to make it work out right, and then make my second 90 degree turn. So I just wanted to hone that in. For those of you that struggle with 180s, this is a method you can try. I like doing 90 degree turns. Somebody will come here, been flying somewhere else for years and I Suppose do some 90 degree autos and I'll go, what? Who does 90s? I do.

Why not?

You know, we do 360s, we do 270s. I've done two 360s I think once. So anyway, anything pop up there, Gary? We need to.

Oh, there's some conversation about managing the RPM near the auto and Taz has been jumping in and helping people with that. If you want to comment just about how to manage the RPMs with the collective.

Well, you know over time we learn. You know, when I started teaching, I was scared to death teaching autos. And I didn't get comfortable teaching them until I probably had 500 hours. And if I go out to teach them today, I'm probably going to want to do a couple on my own and refresh my own technique and memory before I jump and start doing them with someone else. And here's what I've learned. Well, I'm going to give an example. We had two commercial guys here in R22 last spring and they worked with Gary and Chris both on the ground, the flying. And you know, Chris has been in a CFI for about five years. Chris does a great job, but they're down to a day or two before their checkrides. They're both doing commercial add ons. And Chris came to me and he's like, these guys can't do the 180s. I'm scared. I don't know if they're going to make it through the checkride. And I'm like, you want me to go out and fly with them? And he's like, yeah, would you? So I went out with these two and I had an idea what was going to go on. I thought, okay, I'm going to see where their eyes are going during the 180 turn. I'm figuring that they're probably looking too much inside because that's typical, everybody does it. And I also wanted to watch their speed. And I kind of let into it like, okay, let's really work on whichever we were using. Because some people use 60, some of you 65, some use 70. Depends on the aircraft you're flying, the school you're at. But let's say these guys were using 70. I said, I want to make sure today you guys really hone on speed. To me, in 20 years of teaching, it's come more clear to me. This is just my opinion. If you nail the, the speed, everything else will follow. And just in a half an hour of both these guys, I cleaned them up, I took care of the problem by getting them to look outside, start focusing on their spot and not inside, but then making them nail their speed. And they both immediately went, oh my God. And I worked with two other guys in R44 less than a year ago, and they were both having trouble and they were both doing the same thing. And it was up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down. And I kept saying, you guys quit going up and down the collective. Why are you doing that? Well, that's the way we were Trained. I'm like, look, if you set it up nice, you enter it nice, and if you nail the speed, whatever you're using. So again, let's say 70. If you enter it nice and you get that half pull and you set that speed, you'll be amazed. If you control the speed first, how RPM will follow. So if you do the nice entry, keep that speed, focus hard on that speed, don't yanking up and down that collective. Know that as soon as you enter, you're probably going to pull back up. And I know depending on what helicopter you're flying, it could be a little bit different. But in general, we enter, go all the way down, and then usually it's going to take just a small upward pull to bring the RPM back where you want it. And if you can do that, your auto is going to clean up. That's my opinion. Nailing that speed to me again, just over the years of doing them over.

And over and over.

I focus now more on speed than I do anything else. If you nail the speed right, if you enter it nice and you give that half pull, because so many people do that, that other problem is they enter and don't do that half pull. So no matter what it is straight in 180 people have a tendency of entering the auto, not putting the aft cyclic in. So they nose dive a little bit. So then, okay, start speeding up. So then pretty soon you're monkeying with controls if you center it up nice. If you're gonna do your auto at 70, enter, let's say 75 or 72 or 73, enter just a little bit higher than your glide speed so that when you enter, you put that nice little aft pull in there to keep it level. Have that speed set, and you'll be amazed if you can nail that speed. How everything else will follow. So hopefully that helps. Anything else.

That covers the comments for now. Okay, do you want me to roll that foldown straight in?

Yeah, we're gonna roll two videos for you. We're gonna roll up. Everybody wants to know about fold downs. And those of you that are CFIs, you've done full downs. Those of you that are private or commercial and want to do fold down, we want to talk about and hopefully ease your mind a little bit about what the fold down is all about. Some people think they're easier than a power recovery. So we'll roll the first one. This is me and Holli working on our cfi. We'll roll the straight in, full downs, come back, we'll talk about A little bit, and then we'll roll the 180 fold down. So if you want to roll that now.

Okay, so we're gonna go around and we're gonna set up a straight in auto. You know how to set them up? You know how it should look?

Yeah. And airport elevation here is just about the same.

So yesterday the pull downs were challenging because we didn't have much wind. Today we have wind coming almost right down the Runway. I think you're going to notice a big difference in the auto pull downs today versus yesterday. So we're going to make good use of this time because we're here where the checkride is going to be. We got the wind coming down the Runway yesterday. We kind of, you know, got comfortable doing them and just got the feel, got the look. We know that the really nice entries was giving us the really nice pull down. You nailed a couple of them right to the numbers.

We're clear right?

Clear on the left. You've had lots of practice. Enter deciding when to enter, how to enter, how to do a nice entry, how to have a good setup.

So.

We'll come around. Then I set up. Counting off. One, two, three, enter. Once we enter it, if the injury is good, the glide's nice and we like it. Then go ahead and just roll your throttle all the way off. Not chop it, but just smoothly roll it the rest of the way off. Maintain your minimum of 60. At TreeTop, we're going to start a gentle flare or a little below treetop, start a gentle flare. As we get closer to the ground, we'll make it bigger, make it bigger, make it bigger. And the wind today, you're going to notice how it's going to happen. Slower, the flare is going to be slower. We're going to have more time to react, and we're not going to have the run on that we were having yesterday.

Are we going to go. Where do you want to go? To that first intersection?

I want to go to the number nine.

Oh, on the number on the Runway?

Yeah. Okay. Unless some airplanes come in, then we can move over to the taxiway. But again, I like to focus. I like it when we have a. We have a solid. We know right smack dab there. That's where that's where we want to go. That's better for student and instructor. When you're clearly defined spot, you know exactly where you're going.

All right, so let's get everything stabilized here before we make our turn. Going for 1500 and 65 to 70. And I'm going to go out just because I can give myself lots of time. Looking clear on the right.

Clear on the left. And I'm going to do my best, my best job that I can at keeping my hands off the controls, which is hard for me just because.

Understandable.

I'll do my best.

Plenty of people trying to kill you over the years.

Yep. And I'm gonna try to be lean on, let you be as hands on as absolutely possible. So.

Okay, I'm gonna make a radio call here.

All right.

Cocean traffic helicopter 26 papa is on final four, Runway nine. Going for engine failure practice to the number nine. All right, we're at 1500. Get that VSI stabilized here. We have a good entry because key to a good auto is a good entry.

A little bit of left pedal.

Just a little Rpm's top of the green.

Very nice. Nice setup.

All right. And because we have so much wind, I want to enter a little bit later than we did yesterday.

Yep.

I'm going to get that nine pretty much. Pretty close to the black line there.

Yep.

On my windscreen visual.

Looking good.

Looking good. We're still too far. Do you agree?

Yep.

And I'm going to go. 3, 2, 1, enter. Collect it down. Right pedal.

Nice. Good entry.

60.

All right.

RPMs.

I go ahead and roll the throttle off. What do you think? Okay, go ahead and roll that thing.

Throttle's coming off.

Oh, yeah.

Nice.

Enter. You decided at a good point.

All right.

You got it first. Yep.

A little bit more.

Yep. Let her sink before you. Before you level. Pull it up. Yeah. Look at that. Look at that, look at that. Look at that.

Yeah.

Nice.

That's right.

See the difference in the wind? Oh, man. We perfect that flare a little bit. Go ahead and pick us up and we'll see how far past we're spot we are.

All right. I'm gonna roll it up.

Yeah, I'm liking that. Good.

All right.

I think I pushed you to. I think I was afraid you were gonna level out too early. We could wait later. We could get it even closer.

Okay. Hold that flare longer.

It still came out good because of the wind, but yeah, I'd hold the flare and get even closer before you level.

Okay. That was a pretty decent drop. All right. 3,000. I pick it up in a nice gentle two step process. Managing those RPMs as we get light on the skids, eyes out front. All right. RPM and those level. I have to trim it out a little bit here. Actually. I'm going to clear my tail. I just want to See really how far we came.

Probably that might be 50ft.

Nice. That's not bad.

Alright, thanks everybody. That's, that's here. And we want to make sure that we interact with you as promised. So two things. I want to hit and see if Gary brings anything else up and if we haven't, don't feel like we've answered your question appropriately, bring it back up again. Normally Courtney's here and if you, if we slip bind and answer something, bring it up. Gary just mentioned that Paul said something about that related to energy. You know, rpm, altitude, airspeed. You always got to think about those three forms of stored energy. And I've done that video a couple times and I know one time I put just a video out, informational video about how important those three things are and somebody made a wise crack on social media. Oh yeah, like I forgot, huh? That's not what the point. The point is you should be thinking about those three things when you're out there flying and you're doing autos or no matter what, we need those three forms of stored energy. If you have those three and you're managing all those correctly, most likely you're going to be able to handle about any emergency. If you let one of those get behind the curve and then that doesn't matter whether you're taking off, you're landing, you're cross country flying. If you let one of those three get behind the curve, you're gonna have trouble dealing with an emergency and especially in auto rotation. So you know, we don't always harp on the three forms of stored energy. May be enough rpm, altitude, airspeed. You want to be managing all those three things and you should be thinking about those in all of your flying all the time. Rpm, altitude, airspeed. And that's why we use the height velocity diagram for takeoff. So along with all the other things that we learn in performance of the aircraft boils down to managing those three things Taz mentioned. Conversely, if you have low RPMs, then lower the collective to get rid of some of the drag and allow the blades to speed up. Absolutely. It's, you know, if you're in a lightweight condition, you may be RPM may be low the whole time you're coming in depending on what you're flying and what your weight is. And you had a low fuel or yeah, you were low on fuel. And again this varies with helicopters but you know, in general these techniques work pretty much with about anything you're flying. So if your RPM is a little bit low, don't freak out. It's not going to stall on you if you have the collective all the way down, as long as there's not some other contributing factor, like you got into ice and there was ice on your blades or some other mechanical problem. If you're in a helicopter and you lose an engine and if you have airspeed, it's not going to stall on you, even though the horn's going off. And that's one thing that's hard to. Especially training in the Robinsons. I feel it's taken me years to.

Get over the low warning horn.

You know, when I was out with these two in the R22 this past spring, I hadn't flown the R22 in 12 or 13 years, but flown the R44 a lot. So I had Hauser give me a flight review in the R22, and I was amazed at how quick I feel. Felt good in it again before I went out to fly with these two students. And finally, all these years later, the horn didn't really make my heart race like that. You know, took me a lot of years to get over that low horn. So it's very common. Horn goes off, makes your heart race. But just know if that collective is all the way down, it's not going to stall. And if you're a little bit low, Taz is right. Collective all the way down, speed will pick back up. The worst thing to do would be raised collective and drag it down any further. James said he had to overcome fixating outside, keep the scan going. Yes. What I remember from what I was trained years ago and what I use with students is inside, outside, outside at your spot, back inside, outside at your spot, back inside. And I usually pick like, inside, at airspeed, outside of my spot, in it, trim outside to my spot, inside, RPM outside my spot. So for me, it's a cross check, a constant cross check. Spending too much time inside is a problem. Spending too much time outside could be a problem. So you need to divide that attention. It needs to be inside, outside. Depending on who you are and where you're flying, you might have something else that works better than that. But that's. That's what I use. That's what I train as I tell people. It's a constant cross check all the way down, straight ins, 180s, full downs, no matter what you're talking about. It's a constant cross check. And I think the more you get comfortable flying the aircraft, you get better with airspeed, you get better with rpm, you start learning the feel of the aircraft. When you're brand new, it's hard, you know. Or when you're transitioning to a new aircraft, that's a tough thing to do and that's why people struggle in the beginning. And the more time you get with any aircraft, you just get that feel where you can kind of. You can judge airspeed a little bit better. You can judge by the sound of the rotor system, you can judge by the speed of the engine. You'll get better to where you don't have to spend so much time inside. Apologies. My scan for the auto is airspeed RPM outside. Yeah, whatever. Whatever works as long as you're doing both. Not fixating too much inside, not fixating too much outside like I was mentioned, the most recent was the two I seen that were just spending all their time inside and they were totally screwing up the turn and it was making everything just go crazy. And once they learned to look outside, come back, check back outside. We cleaned everything right up. Okay, I better scroll down here, see what else we may have. Am I getting everything, Gary? Yeah, yeah.

Good stuff.

Alright, well, if you got it ready, let's go ahead and roll. That last video with Holley, there's so much content. I had trouble picking what did I want to roll today. And I thought, you know what? I want to pick some stuff that today wasn't. We're teaching you brand new from scratch. Odd rotations. We want to give tips, tricks, ease your mind on some things. We want to talk about foldowns because so many people are just nervous about a foldown. So we wanted to show some of those and have that discussion as well. So we'll roll that and then we'll come back and check and see what else you got.

Whatever you want to do.

Let's do some 180s.

Sounds good. Let's do it. We haven't hurt the. We haven't hurt two six papa at all. She's alright. She's good. Okay, so we went kookum. I did it. You did it. We didn't slam it down. We just didn't land as level as we should have. I'm wondering if the wind hasn't died back down on us now.

Gotta be some reason, right?

Of course. Why? Why? I didn't just do it with perfection right on the first try. Had to be some other factor. All right, I'm gonna leave you alone on this too. What do you think? Okay, I'm just gonna shut up and let you do it.

All right? Pre takeoff check. Lights are warnings. All instruments are in the Green, we got fuel.

I think the good news is now, now that we're into it and we're digging it and we're doing them and we're dissecting it, that's a good thing.

Yeah, yeah, we got it. Now we're just trying to make it better.

All right, shut up, shut up. No talking.

Talk to the hand. Oh, yeah, my hand's on the collective.

Well, you're right. I mean, I'm not going to be there with you on Friday, so I need to shut up and let you do it.

Hey, I don't want to overfly these aircraft. Oh, I am nowhere close to where I need to be. All right, I'm going to go around here. Clear left.

Clear on the left.

Thursday traffic 70158 was uniform. Flying over the field.

Not too close.

How about you try this road over here? It's right now. Now this looks better. At first, yeah, it was two, one.

Enter right pedal, collect it down, get in the turn. Pitch for 60. Not too turn. All right, I'm going to add a little collective. Pretty high flare, huh?

Yeah, but keep, just keep flaring it till you get almost there. Look at that, look at that, look at that. But see how we're just about ready to. I mean, we're clear down to 2000rpm right before we touch. So really good. I mean, entry good turn good. Judging your spot, really good. Flare was good.

Just.

We just needed a little closer to the ground.

We are on.

But you hit the numbers. You hit the number nine, so that's awesome. And I gave you a push there. I don't know if you felt it.

I did not.

Because I went like this. And then it popped right back because it wasn't, you know, I went.

Okay.

I was trying to keep you level longer before you start your flare.

Okay. I was like.

Went like that and you went. But that's getting pretty. I mean, look where we're at. I mean, pretty damn good.

Yeah.

I mean, that's pretty good.

Not bad. I mean, we're close to perfection. I mean, we're close to perfection.

Isn't it funny, though, my 180s have always been better.

I told you that. Do you remember me telling you a week ago or so that some people a 180 comes out better than a straight in?

I don't remember that.

I know.

You can't remember everything I said, right?

It's true. For some reason, some people think a 180 auto pull down is easier than a straight in.

Awesome.

Well, no question on Whether or not we got the spot.

We got the spot that we did. I'd go do another one.

Yep, at least one. Goshen Traffic helicopter 206 pop is on the go off Runway nine. Gonna.

Paul made a comment. Love pull down autos. So do we. I mean, autos are fun. They're intimidating in the beginning. We know that people get hurt and a lot of accidents happen through training with auto rotation. So there is a lot of drama around it and there is reason to be careful and have good quality training. But they get to be more fun the more you do them. And we're going to try to wrap this up because we're like 58 minutes and we're trying to keep these at an hour. I used to have. Guilty. I'd go on an hour and a half or two hours. We could talk about autos all day long. We can always do another one in the future if we want to go more in depth on one specific one. But hopefully we gave you some good food for thought today. I think we got everybody answered. If you don't, please email us because we've always got stuff that we can send you or we can make something new. As always, magnets, pass your checkride. Send us a picnic. Well, there just a quick little blurb about your checkride. We send you the cool refrigerator magnet, send us a video hogs T shirt. We still got a bunch of them. People aren't sending us videos. We want some videos. So pass your checkride. Members, email us a picture or video. We'll send you your gift. I'm gonna let Gary wrap up with a little bit about the wings program. It's up and running, but I'm gonna let him tell you about that since he's been the one behind the three months of working that and then we'll. And then we'll get out of here.

Okay, just real quick, we'll make it short. A reminder to everybody, we are FAA accredited for wings. Every course now has an exam at the end that reports directly to the FAA safety and you will see your wings credit within 24 hours of taking and passing that test. So we've limited the test to 100 questions. We really had to chop a lot of content out there to get them right there at the 100. But you can pass it 70% and get your wings phase accredited as promised. If you need to join helicopter online ground and you're just in here for live Tuesday, I'm going to give you a discount code that will work on unlimited or yearly GC15 off. GC15 off. Kenny, I'll go back to you for a second and then I'll roll the end.

Awesome. We're gonna get out of here since we think we got everybody covered. Subscribe to our channel. If you're just watching on YouTube and you're not a member or subscribe to our channel yet, do us a favor. Subscribe to our channel. Like this video. Comment down below. Use Gary's code. You gc150ff helicopterground.com link is down in the description box below. There's also some other info down there. Free book. Download my book. Helicopter checkride that should be down there and I'll check after we're done make sure that link's down there. Our Instagram and Facebook's in there so there's free stuff for you. So let's wrap it up and get out of here. Thanks for everybody that was here today. Thanks for commenting. Thanks for your input. Thanks for making Live Training Tuesday become an awesome thing that just keeps growing in popularity. And we appreciate everybody that's here. So subscribe to our channel. Like the video, make a comment, share it. Please join Ground School with Gary's Gary's special code and we'll see you next Tuesday. Sam.

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Sam sa.

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