Kenny Keller wraps up 30 days of daily helicopter videos with the core lesson: smooth control inputs. New students overcontrol and grip too tight, but every maneuver, even emergencies, needs to be gentle. His online ground school at helicopterground.com launches around Feb 15.
February 1 (original plan).
Around February 15 (revised target).
This has been fun. I've enjoyed doing it. I've learned a ton of stuff and I want to thank everybody that's been tuning in all month. It's been quite an experience and it's been kind of a challenge because in reality I pretty much do the flying by myself. I have one part time instructor and virtually no office help. And so I pretty much do everything myself. So it's been a pretty big feat trying to keep the aircraft going, getting it for maintenance, fly with students, do the marketing, do the videos, do the editing, so on, so forth. So it's really been cool. And I want to end with the three key terms for learning to fly helicopters and three key terms for perfecting your maneuvers and all the things that you're going to do in the aircraft, and that is smooth control inputs. Remember those three words? Every single thing we do in the helicopter is smooth control inputs. There's never any reason of any kind to jerk any of the controls abruptly in the helicopter. Even the emergency stuff we do, everything that we do is nice and smooth. Example quick stops. I've had one of my instructors early on said, you know, we should probably call them slow stop, not call them quick stop because that gives you the impression that you gotta yank the cyclic back and jerk the collective around. And that's not the case. The true trick to learning to fly these things is smooth control inputs. And that's like the quickstop. Even though you're quickly de accelerating the helicopter, the control inputs should still be smooth. And when it comes to learning to fly and learning to hover, we got a little video here in the background and just kind of showing you what a typical person does when they start learning to fly. They're all over the place. And that's natural, everybody does it. But if you can start out remembering, hey, I know that I'm going to over control this thing, I'm going to get a monster grip, I'm going to forget to breathe. You got to kind of psych yourself up and just say, you know, I know these are the things I'm going to do, but I'm going to work really hard at fighting those off. So really the trick to get through the training, and it's not even a trick to save yourself some money and some headache and heartache, just go in with the attitude that I have to use smooth control, those really are the three key terms. And I've thought that for many years that I should just wear something on my, around my neck, hanging off my chest that says smooth control inputs, because that's what people have so much trouble with, is just learning that light touch and those smooth, smooth, gentle movements we joke all the time about. Use the force, Luke. And one of my students has his Yoda tree out here. When he's trying to hover, he finds his Yoda tree. And we have a lot of fun with that because it's truly what they say. Sometimes it's more like you're willing it to move than actually moving it. So hope you enjoy the video we have here and please keep tuning in. And one more announcement since we're here at the end. Helicopterground.com I wanted to be live February 1st. Well, with this whole month of doing these videos, it's held me up just a little bit, but it is being built. And now that I won't be shooting one of these every day and worrying about this, I really and truly have plan on being live by the 15th, probably even sooner. But we're gonna really start putting the pressure on and getting that thing live and it's gonna be cool. So stay tuned for that and hopefully some of you will want sign up for that and check it out. And I'll be looking for comments and feedback as always, because it's going to be my first run at designing this and getting it up and running, and I'm going to continue to work on it. It's going to be a continual operation where I'm not just going to throw up some stuff and then just leave it stagnant. I'm going to continue to build on it, improve things, improve the videos. We've got all kinds of tools that we're using to make demonstrations on different things, so it should be really cool. Please click the like button as always. And thanks everybody for joining in and watching my videos and tuning in. It's been a. It's been a fun deal and I really appreciate it. So keep tuning in and we'll see you all very soon. Thanks. It.
